[CONVERSATION AMONG ET's:] "Hey! I think we should contact people on other planets that are really, really, really far away" "Good idea! Let's use radio waves which will take thousands of years to arrive. Then, when the recipients reply back, it'll take thousands of years for us to receive their signal, and we'll all be long-dead and forgotten" "Brilliant!"
I wish those scientists would have read your post before wasting all that money -- you'd think those smart people would have thought this through a little more.
Radio waves are just as fast as light -- it's all, like, electromagnetic radiation, man. Spoiler SETI is actually a really smart, relatively cheap program. Looking in the radio band makes a lot of sense.
Any aliens within 100ly - 120ly would be able to tune into "Gangbusters" or "The Jack Benny Show" or "I Love Lucy" by pointing their version of Arecebio at us, though output is way down from its heyday in the 50's/60's.
What if in their evolution, they sent radio waves that takes hundreds or thousands of years to reach here, but have evolved beyond that since then? At any given time, you send what you're capable of sending, don't you? Also, just because you're more advanced doesn't mean you can't understand something less advanced. Or maybe you send something simplistic that you believe most intelligent life would be capable of communicating with... like the plaque on Pioneer 10. We sent a record on Voyager... hope they have record players. That was what the medium of the day was, so we sent it... now we have digital music, so it looks archaic.
Radio waves are blasted to the entire universe. Faster OTA comms like laser links are directional and targeted. A stray one out in the universe would be like finding a needle in a universe haystack. At least, that’s my understanding.
Yeah, but SETI does that, as well. They don't just look for radio waves. The reason radio waves were selected initially I think was because so much of that radiation leaks out from earth, so why not from another planet. Sure, it won't be easy, but... wth.
This is a disaster that could have been avoided, in my humble opinion. . . . . . one that is also a metaphor for how the current administration views science.
I read a sci-fi book recently set in the next 100 years where we discovered aliens had arrived in the Oort cloud and sent a ship to investigate. It turned out that the aliens were so ordered and precise that anything they did had an exact reason, and they couldn't understand why we were beaming random bullshit into space on radio waves. So they interpreted it as a virus and an attack and had come to our solar system to launch their counterattack.
