People are so obsessed with contacting aliens, but maybe they are really really annoying.
I’m convinced if the dark forest hypothesis. Even 200 ly is too big for me.
I did not order these ton of bricks, but I’m grateful. Thanks friend!
There are around 20000 stars in that little 200-light-year-wide dot.
https://www.pas.rochester.edu/~emamajek/memo_star_dens.html and 1pc≈3.3ly.
The Fermi Paradox doesn’t seem that paradoxical when you see a map like this. Civilizations could be screaming into the void for millenniums without reaching the other side of the galaxy. Signal strength drops fast too. How would would ever distinguish a faded signal from background noise?
Currently reading through the 3 body problem and it touches the idea that maybe we shouldn’t scream into the void.
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What’s also neat, is that this diagram won’t need updating any time soon. Maybe in a hundred years, we can swap the 2 for a 3 in the label. 🥴
200 light years radius is for radio signals to reach someone. 100 years radius for possibly receiving a signal back.
And that is if they received our signals, are able to identify that they are artificial signals out of the background noise of the rest of the universe because the signal degrades and gets weaker as the broadcast expands, they decide to send a reply back (even though they just recieve chatter at that point, not intentional communication to them), and then actually sends us a signal back. It’s no wonder that hasn’t happened yet.
There’s around 10-15,000 stars in a 100 light years radius. The chance that any of those stars have habitable planets with intelligent life with the technology to receive and send radio signals and is listening for extraterrestial signals and can discern those broadcasts from background noise and would reply to chatter… that’s a small chance. For context, we have only been explicitly listening for and sending signals intended for extraterrestrials for 64 years ourselves, so an identical civilization 100 light years away that received and replied to us immediately would still have 36 years of transit left on their reply.
200 light years radius is for radio signals to reach someone. 100 years radius for possibly receiving a signal back
So I have more bad news, the strength of our radio signals is not very strong either so by about 20ly, they fade into background noise so no one would be able to pick them up at all. (could be a lot less than 20ly too, possibly 5 ly depending on the signal)
Yeah I figured that that distance was wishful thinking.
Sadly
Never give up! Never surrender!
Apparently “the first audio radio broadcast of voice and music occurred on December 24, 1906, when Canadian-American inventor Reginald A Fessenden transmitted from Brant Rock, Massachusetts. This historic transmission, heard by shipboard radio operators along the Atlantic Coast, included Fessenden playing the violin solo of ‘O Holy Night’ and reading from the Bible, marking the beginning of amplitude modulation (AM) broadcasting”.
I wonder if that’s what aliens would hear as the first sign of humans?
the first audio radio broadcast of voice and music occurred on December 24, 1906
And the strength of that signal would have been so weak that even at a distance of only 5ly (maybe less), background noise would drown it out completely.
No one knows we are here.
only 99,800 years to go. optimism!
“I am Optimus Prime, and I send this message to any surviving Autobots taking refuge among the stars: We are here. We are waiting.”
