True, but somebody could do a cool count-up “clock” like the “debt clock” that would count the stars that have heard our transmissions, so far.
Call the start 1926, though we had some largish transmitters earlier. By '26, I think they were all over the world, broadcasting every direction.
So call it 100ly, and get a count, then advance by 1ly/yr. The number of stars would go up as the cube of time.
So remember when you’re feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space
'Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth!
Amazing song. Link for reference:
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)
deleted by creator
People are so obsessed with contacting aliens, but maybe they are really really annoying.
I got some bad news for you. We are the annoying aliens.
“Squeglesquortsquersqueweldorf” [“The earthlings are broadcasting again. Maintain radio silence; do not respond!”]
So not too different from us then?
I did not order these ton of bricks, but I’m grateful. Thanks friend!
Space expands like bread expands, everywhere all at once. Your galaxies are like raisins in that bread. The space around them is carrying them while it expands. This means it’s pretty much guaranteed, you’ll eventually be gaining distance from all other galaxies faster than the speed of light. Because the distance isn’t a function of speed, but growth — so it can go faster than c. You, however, can never go faster than c. So, the picture is right.
Just invent wormholes to access hyperspace, and cross the universe in one step
I don’t think you want to deal with wormhole TSA, friend.
You go through TSA at the space ports before boarding the ship. The only thing different about going through a wormhole is a bit of turbulence, some spaghettification, and the unverifiable possibility that the physical organism which gets reconstituted on the other side is merely an empty vessel programmed to unconsciously imitate your habits and mannerisms, while the conscious entity that is you actually perished upon the dissolution of your original body.
unverifiable possibility that the physical organism which gets reconstituted on the other side is merely an empty vessel programmed to unconsciously imitate your habits and mannerisms
Oh yeah, I’ve tried anesthesia before.
Is that a theory about anesthesia? I haven’t heard about that.
I’m referring to ideas about teleportation and time travel, in which the physical organism dissolves and is reconstituted, and appears to be alive and conscious on the other side, but the actual conscious entity died upon dissolution and was not resurrected upon reconstitution.
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.
Before anyone gets too cocky, remember that signal strength drops off at the square of distance. Even this tiny blip of range generally pales in comparison to the background radiation. We’re still almost invisible to our own technology at any serious distance.
For a reference, see how absolutely difficult it is to talk to the Voyager probes. The signal they receive is absolutely tiny. (20 billion times smaller than what it takes to run a digital watch, see the Deep Space Network for what does the talking).
If any aliens have heard us, their technology already outstrips ours by orders of magnitude.
Thanks for the pep talk.
spoiler
(I can’t find the actual scene where they explain how the aliens used the Hitler Berlin Games broadcast because it was the first really high-power transmission, but got as close as I could.)
And if their technology outstrips us by that much, would they even notice us?
they probably here already.some of us might even be one.
Notice? Maybe. Care? Lol, no.
If we were the first other species they’d care
Not care like an ant colony a few thousand miles away or not care like an ant colony in my kitchen?
how exactly would you get an ant colony in your kitchen?
Same same.
Unless they need resources.
what resources do we have that wouldn’t be elsewhere, in likely greater abundance/concentration?
latest estimate is there are 6 billion earth-like planets in our galaxy. and 200+ confirmed temperate rocky planets we have catalogged already out of 2000 ID’d exoplanets.
biomass. more souls for the torment nexus.
We don’t have to be unique, we might just be the next stop that has the resources. Maybe they’re supernaturally interstellar and can move on. Maybe they’re barely interstellar and can’t afford to skip. Maybe nearly every earth-like has life and it’s all deemed lower-ranking than this interstellar society. Maybe nearly every earth-like has life but this interstellar species has no anthropomorphic mammalian qualities and they don’t care. There’s no reason to beleive we can negotiate with aliens when humans largely do not respectfully negotiate with other species now. Hell, we don’t negotiate respectfully between ourselves
what resources do we have that wouldn’t be elsewhere, in likely greater abundance/concentration?
Our women, duh. Do you not watch movies smh
Soil. Go look around for soil on any other planet. There isn’t any.
There might also be a lot of value in studying alien intelligence. We don’t know because we’ve never met any, but imagine doing so is a serious way to discover something new about how the universe can be understood at all.
Edit: by that, I mean the taxonomy on our phenomenology. There’s nothing ontological about feeling “good” or “bad,” nor “confused,” “scared,” or “horny.” Not even of those “aha” moments when you figure something out.
We have hundreds millions of years worth of systems evolution in our head, creating a damn fine survival engine. Hell, it even helps us feel a little like we understand the universe and how it works. Surely theres not just our way to do that, and aliens could be interested in our way.
what resources do we have that wouldn’t be elsewhere, in likely greater abundance/concentration?
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complex biochemistry & biodiversity
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life forms intelligent enough to serve as slaves
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technology*
*Yes, even if the aliens are far more advanced than us, they may still be interested in reviewing our technology. Because technological advancement is not a strictly linear process. Even if they’re far more advanced, we may have a few things that we’ve invented/refined that they haven’t. If I were to place bets, I’d wager on internal combustion engines and firearms as technologies that we may have refined to a greater degree than aliens. Neither of these would be entirely novel technologies, of course. Combusting fuel inside a cylinder to drive a reciprocating piston? Combusting mild explosives inside a barrel to impart kinetic energy into a slug to cause damage at long range? They surely would have invented such things already. But if the chemistry of their home planet is a bit different, or if they invented technologies that replaced these earlier, then they likely wouldn’t have put nearly as much time and effort into refining them over time. Our engines and guns are still probably ‘primitive’ to them on the whole, but they could still learn some things by studying how much we’ve refined and perfected these primitive technologies, as ours may be more powerful and more efficient than any of the ones they ever developed.
There’s a plethora of possibilities here, and as you say, they could be very “resource steered”. On a planet with absolutely massive reserves of easily available iron or aluminium, but basically no calcium oxide, reinforced concrete may never have been invented. Sure, based on the composition of the known universe, that’s highly unlikely, but it’s far from impossible.
I think we tend to forget how our society and technology is shaped by the materials available to us. A planet with a significantly different composition could quickly end up with drastically different technology. Regarding combustion engines: If their atmosphere has significantly less oxygen than ours, they would be so inefficient that they were abandoned early, while if their atmosphere has very high oxygen content the fuels could be regarded as too unsafe to work with, also leading to early abandonment.
If their crust, air, or water has significant acid content, they may never have gotten far with metal working (because everything just corrodes) and developed highly advanced polymers, ceramics, and glasses instead.
The list goes on and on…
- point is unlikely imo. Biology is messy and unreliable and beings smart enough to serve as useful slaves, are hard to deal with, especially hyper-social ones like us. And artifical sentience can easily be limited, while biological one needs eugenic efforts and still requires strict controls because of how evolution works. Robots are just easier, once you have figured them out. We are still in the infancy there.
Spot the USian. lol.
It’s true, though. And not exactly flattering.
But we have put a bonkers amount of research and development into those two technologies … technologies that are very ‘skippable’ for an alien race that may have developed better alternatives sooner.
Say … if Earth had much smaller reserves of fossil fuels, leading to the reserves running basically dry in the 1960s, then we might have moved on to electric vehicles much sooner. Which means we wouldn’t have put all the research we currently have into crazy refinements like electronically controlled ignition and valve timing, variable geometry turbochargers, oil additives, emissions control systems, etc.
If someone had invented a practical railgun in the mid-1800s, we may never have put so much scientific effort into firearms and may never have developed things like spitzer boattail projectiles, progressive twist rifling, non-corrosive primers, or even smokeless powder.
And maybe it’s just my own biases talking because those are fields I know fairly well, but I do think those are prime candidates for technologies we may have developed and refined more than advanced aliens ever did. And, no, that doesn’t reflect particularly well on us. But other technologies – like, say, polymer plastics or electronics – are things I think aliens would have developed no matter what, and probably would have developed more advanced versions than ours.
There still are other possibilities, though. Perhaps the aliens have a very cooperative and trusting society, so they never developed advanced cryptography and computer security. Perhaps they have better natural healing and self-regeneration capabilities, so they never developed medical technology and prosthetics to our degree. Perhaps they have a cultural/religious aversion to meddling with nature, so they never developed selective breeding, domestication, and gene editing. Perhaps their home planet has extremely stable and predictable weather patterns, so they never bothered with developing meteorology very much. Perhaps their planet has little or no atmospheric oxygen, making fire something they pretty much only see in laboratory settings, so our intensive development of fire detection and suppression technologies are novel.
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Coming here from another star system in a reasonable time would require more energy than they’d get by turning every planet in the solar system to energy with perfect efficiency. There are no exotic elements here that aren’t present everywhere in the universe.
What resources could a space-faring civilization need that earth has?Well, maybe they’ll want to build a hyper-space bypass through here.
Coming here from another star system in a reasonable time would require more energy than they’d get by turning every planet in the solar system to energy with perfect efficiency.
… I’m not sure that’s right. If you’re in the convert matter to energy game, you can go a long way with just a little bit. That
c^2bit ofe=mc^2is obscenely massive, and most importantly, since your kinetic energy is1/2mv^2, efficiency and relativistic limitations aside, to get something going close to the speed of light you need to convert roughly the same amount of mass to energy for propulsion.There’s some nuance there, but even 100:1 means you could get a ship the size of Manhattan traveling at near light speed for a good sized asteroid of mass. No need to fuck with planets.
The rocket equation is a bitch.
If you want to accelerate close to c, brake at earth, then do the same thing again on the way back, you’ll need to carry a planet mass worth of fuel at launch, just to propel a small craft.
And then you still haven’t done anything productive in our solar system.The rocket equation assumes you need to bring all your fuel with you.
But with things like laser-propelled light sails, you might be able to propel the ship with energy the ship doesn’t need to carry.
Look at Bussard Ramjet. Why would you carry your fuel with adequately advanced technology (let alone zero point quantum stuff)
Shields are much more interesting near c.
in a reasonable time
What a ‘reasonable’ time is may depend heavily on perspective.
If the aliens are robotic/electronic in nature (perhaps having long ago replaced their biological predecessors), long timescales may mean nothing to them. Simply go into ‘sleep mode’ until the ship arrives. Or not … a robot might have no concept of ‘boredom’ and no problem remaining fully conscious for however long it takes to slowly cross the distance.
If the aliens naturally have very long lifespans, they may view a travel time of 500 years as ‘reasonable’ for such an important voyage.
If they have some sort of ‘hive mind’, where a large group of them can consider themselves a single individual (or even just a very collectivist culture), then they may see no issue in crossing interstellar distances in a ‘generation ship’ where only the eventual descendants of the original crew will reach the destination.
If they’ve perfected some sort of anti-aging technology and/or the ability to freeze themselves in stasis, they might see a long travel time as relatively unimportant. If they live indefinitely long and are already thousands of years old, what’s a few hundred years of spaceflight? If they can freeze themselves (literally or figuratively) and wake up when they’re about to arrive so that the subjective travel time is only a few hours, they may see that as worthwhile.
would require more energy
… if done by any technology we know or could dream up with our current understanding of physics.
But we already know our understanding of physics is fundamentally incomplete. We don’t know what dark matter or dark energy are. We don’t have a reliably working theory of quantum gravity. We haven’t managed to join quantum physics and relativity together yet in any functional way.
It’s highly speculative, of course, but we can’t rule out the possibility that aliens with a better understanding of physics might be able to develop a way to travel at extremely high speeds without needing as much energy as our current physics suggest it would require.
The amount of energy required also greatly depends on the mass of the ship making the journey. It’s possible they could reduce the energy requirement by miniaturizing their spaceship. Say, a very small robotic probe capable of self-replication, and carrying blueprints for building more macro-scale technology and possibly rebuilding the aliens themselves. The tiny spaceship can then be accelerated to very high speeds with relatively little energy. When it arrives (say, on the far side of the moon), it can then harvest local resources to replicate itself into an army of builder bots, and then use more local resources for those builder bots to assemble a proper alien ship/base, complete with aliens inside. With this strategy, all you need to carry is enough machinery to build a copy of the probe + data storage to contain all the blueprints. Conceivably, that could all be achieved in a very small package, perhaps even microscopic – after all, self-replication and data storage are things that microscopic single-celled organisms can do on earth. In theory, there’s no reason a microscopic robot couldn’t do the same things. You could achieve extremely high velocities with relatively little energy if your spaceship was, say, 1cm in diameter and weighed less than half a gram.
… human resources?
all our fears of aliens are just projections of what we do to each other.
hence all the raping, pillaging, and butt probing.
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. 🥴
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.
This is an approximation, right? Because there’s no giant cosmic mirror that lets us see our galaxy from far away like this?
Just send a drone above the Milky Way and take a picture
See the text in the bottom left of the image.
Soo, the grey slury inbetween is more rock-heavy, while the blue stuff is mostly hydrogen?
Generally speaking, clouds of hydrogen are usually pink.
Yeah, i thought more of the implications on gas planets vs. rocky planets forming. We are on the outer rim of a dusty region, if this illustration is accurate.
only 99,800 years to go. optimism!
*299,800
*width of milky way end to end
Further than I would have guessed!
It’s not the black square, it’s the tiny blue dot in the black square.
I’m aware. It’s still further than I would have thought
