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Something that I muse about is that this bubble may indeed be a thin shell. My rationale is that already the bulk of our communications are confined to waveguid
by analog31 5mo ago
Something that I muse about is that this bubble may indeed be a thin shell. My rationale is that already the bulk of our communications are confined to waveguides -- optical fibers. Our wireless comms continue to be engineered to produce less power and to be almost indistinguishable from noise. Much of our AC power travels along paired wires whose fields cancel one another at the equivalent of an inverse-fourth law or worse. Soon they may all be DC.
The civilizations who are "out there" may only have a narrow time window to pick up our signals. Like we've fashioned a poor man's Dyson sphere.
- marcus_holmes 5mo agoAgreed. Also, the audience and business model for commercial radio and television stations are declining, and it's easy to see a point where nobody listens to radio or watches television any more and they stop broadcasting.
- amarant 5mo agoI'm surprised anyone does either of those things now! Well except for that one special time of year, but honestly Eurovision ought to be streaming online instead of broadcasting on TV already!
- marcus_holmes 5mo agoAliens will enjoy the kitsch just as much as we earthlings surely?!
- amarant 5mo agoGood point! I can hardly think of a better way to start friendly relations with extraterrestrials than broadcasting Eurovision to them.
- wa2flq 5mo agoThere was a Star Trek book (The Abode of Life?) that had a planet that where the communication was mostly confined to the planet. I think Uhura detected the planet from the background noise.