03-01-2016, 02:12 AM
(This post was last modified: 03-01-2016, 02:17 AM by APeacefulWarrior.)
There are loads of issues with the Fermi Paradox and too many unknowns to be able to accurately assess whether we "should" be picking up outside radio waves.
The speed of light is of course the biggest problem. We're living in a relatively sparse area of the milky way galaxy. There may be millions of potentially inhabited systems, but most of them are way too far away for meaningful contact to actually occur. Signal strength is also a factor here. Even "empty" space is filled with things which can disrupt and distort radio waves. It's entirely possible we're being bombarded by alien radio signals and have no way of telling because they're so degraded they're just part of the background noise.
Or maybe the waves aren't even aimed at Earth at all.
And that's assuming they're using radio at all AND broadcasting at high enough strengths that the waves could actually go 100LY or 100,000LY or even more. Nothing says this is necessarily the case. High-power RF broadcasting is a relatively ineffectient method of transmission. Even here on Earth, we're starting to move away from it. Just look at the shift from terrestrial radio to Internet radio, and from broadcast TV to cable-based systems. And what if they aren't as veiled as us and have telepathy, which would render radio unnecessary? I tend to think radio broadcasting would turn out to be a transient form of communication.
Or then there's the issue of encoding. A transmission that is tightly encoded would be virtually impossible for us to crack, and might not even be recognizable as informational at all. And that's assuming it's containing information we can potentially comprehend. If a hypothetical alien species communicated by scent, for example, encoding smells as RF waves, we would NEVER work that out without a primer. It would just be another "well, that's funny" radio blip that no one can ever prove to be of alien origin.
For us to pick up an alien broadcast and recognize it as such, it would have to be A)aimed at Earth with, B)an extremely high-power broadcast, C)on frequencies we're scanning for, D)unencoded or deliberately including a primer, and E)coming from a species which developed and continued using radio almost exactly X years ago where X equals their distance in light years.
So does it really seem THAT hard to believe we haven't picked up any signals we recognized?
The speed of light is of course the biggest problem. We're living in a relatively sparse area of the milky way galaxy. There may be millions of potentially inhabited systems, but most of them are way too far away for meaningful contact to actually occur. Signal strength is also a factor here. Even "empty" space is filled with things which can disrupt and distort radio waves. It's entirely possible we're being bombarded by alien radio signals and have no way of telling because they're so degraded they're just part of the background noise.
Or maybe the waves aren't even aimed at Earth at all.
And that's assuming they're using radio at all AND broadcasting at high enough strengths that the waves could actually go 100LY or 100,000LY or even more. Nothing says this is necessarily the case. High-power RF broadcasting is a relatively ineffectient method of transmission. Even here on Earth, we're starting to move away from it. Just look at the shift from terrestrial radio to Internet radio, and from broadcast TV to cable-based systems. And what if they aren't as veiled as us and have telepathy, which would render radio unnecessary? I tend to think radio broadcasting would turn out to be a transient form of communication.
Or then there's the issue of encoding. A transmission that is tightly encoded would be virtually impossible for us to crack, and might not even be recognizable as informational at all. And that's assuming it's containing information we can potentially comprehend. If a hypothetical alien species communicated by scent, for example, encoding smells as RF waves, we would NEVER work that out without a primer. It would just be another "well, that's funny" radio blip that no one can ever prove to be of alien origin.
For us to pick up an alien broadcast and recognize it as such, it would have to be A)aimed at Earth with, B)an extremely high-power broadcast, C)on frequencies we're scanning for, D)unencoded or deliberately including a primer, and E)coming from a species which developed and continued using radio almost exactly X years ago where X equals their distance in light years.
So does it really seem THAT hard to believe we haven't picked up any signals we recognized?