This story http://astronomy.com/news/2016/06/it-may-take-1500-years-to-meet-et this morning and the one about the Gravitational waves http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap160615.html got me thinking. In the first story, they claim that we can only hope to hear from ET in 1500 years because our radio signals will by then have reached about half the stars in the Milky Way. That does not make sense to me. If ET started their TV service 500 years ago and if they are say 300 light years away those signals are going past us all the time. Our signals are also getting fainter the further they go and so are theirs. The second story is that we’ed now detected gravitational waves for the second time, the first time was just the other day. We only detect them now because the equipment is now sensitive enough to do so. Are ET’s TV signals going past us but we can not detect them? Is it our equipment that’s not good enough? Are they using some other way to communicate? Or are we alone?
I cant comment about radio waves and the like however I feel it wouldnt be logical to assume we are alone. Intelligent or not, there is certainly life out there.
I’ve always thought advanced alien species would employ lots of encryption and compression in their communications and it would thus appear to us as white noise.
That would imply that a civilisation would only have employed analog or clear digital communications for a brief period in their existence.
So, even if you assume we have the tech to detect whatever “waves” it is they might use, it would appear to us as random noise anyway (as it does now).
Radio is incredibly inefficient as a means of communication. Take your favourite radio station: how much of the broadcast power actually ends up hitting a receiving antenna? About of a googleth of it? Perhaps aliens have come to a similar conclusion and found another means of communicating which we have hitherto not discovered. They could be yapping into their sub-ether communicators all around us and we can’t hear them.
Bet they all have cable.
[They could be yapping into their sub-ether communicators all around us and we can’t hear them.]
Apparently this is what elephants do…
http://www.elephantvoices.org/studies-a-projects/echo-of-the-elephants.html