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originally posted by: eriktheawful
Go out past 100 light years from Earth and you will not hear anything as none of our radio signals have traveled that far yet.
originally posted by: eriktheawful
a reply to: chr0naut
I remember reading in scifi books when I was a teen: laser or maser communications.
It's still using electromagnetic energy, but it's not radio frequencies, and it's a very tight beam width. Pretty much unless it's aimed at you, you're not going to see it.
Of course one issue with that is: location. If you don't know where the person or thing you want to communicate with is, you won't know where to aim your beam....where as if you use a broad beam form of communication and broadcast outward, as long as you're in the general direction it's aimed towards, you'll receive it.
originally posted by: lord sword
I was thinking that RF would have to be pretty strong for us to tell the different from background nose.
originally posted by: eriktheawful
a reply to: cyberjedi
The time period is tricky, because back when the Milky Way formed over 13 billion years ago, those stars were (and are) Population 3 stars, meaning they contained pretty much no metal at all, no heavy elements at all, because those elements did not exist yet. That means, most likely no rocky planets.
No rocky planets, or just a few that have no metals in them, means no one is going to be building any kind of radio of any kind.
So we have to way several billion years for enough stars to form the heavier elements through fusion, which we finally get, and then the Population 2 stars form....they've got some metal....but are still very poor in metal. Not a lot in them, which means again, rocky planets that are very metal poor.
It's not until you get to the Population 1 stars (which is what our sun is), that you have a lot more metals, which means you have rocky planets that have a lot more metals.
That didn't start happening until 6 to 8 billion years ago.
Okay, so still, lots of time there.
Ah, but now you run into the other question (which I've not done a thread on yet, but will be doing it): how long did it take for the first planets to not only form where they could have life....but how often does intelligent tool using life develop?
We don't really know the answer to that question yet, as we only have one example to go by right now: Earth.
We know that it took 4.5 billion years for us, from the time the Earth formed to right up where we finally evolved humans who finally figured out how to make radios.
Does it always take that long? Can the time be shorter? Does it sometimes take longer?
And the really big question: How often does it happen?
One thing that I've noticed in these threads, and it's pretty interesting: many people keep assuming that if there are intelligent tool using aliens out there, they must also be older than humans and much more advanced than us all the time.
I guess it's because people look at the age of the universe and think: almost 14 billion years....that's old, so of course there should be aliens billions of years older than us.
Thing is, no, 14 billion years is not old. It's young actually. We have red dwarf stars who's fuel will last 200 to 400 billion years. Some may even last up to a trillion years. Red dwarfs are the most common stars in the universe actually.
Also again: just because life can form somewhere doesn't mean it must lead to intelligent life all the time. Look at the dinosaurs. They ruled this planet for almost 200 million years. None of them developed an intelligence that led them to become tools users that could affect their environment.
Mostly this is for another thread, but:
Humans? Well, primates showed up around 7 million years ago (remember, dino's were gone 65 million years ago, so it took 58 million years before any primates showed up)......and then finally, after even more special circumstances, about 3 million years go, a group of those primates splinters off and began to evolve in to humans....who after a very long time, began to use rocks as tools.
So how often does that happen?
That's the big question. Maybe we are the first to get this advanced.....others around us might still be catching up.
Or....maybe they did get as advanced as us, millions of years ago.....and have now not only advanced tech beyond what we can think of, but have evolved even more beyond anything we can comprehend.
It's interesting to think about it.