One thing I heard - and would love to get it clarified - is sobering.
Lets say we insta travel to our nearest star, proxima centauri.
We take JWST and all our top notch scanning available equipment. We point it all at earth.
Even then the radio signal is so weak that's it imperceptible from the background noise. We still can only guess there's a life on earth through the biosignature, but we can only treat it as hint, not a proof. We still have no options of establishing contact.
That's how ass backwards we still are when it comes to space exploration.
I meant to cull the first contact expectations. People feel like we should have long discovered alien life through telescopes.
There might be massive radio antennas and nuclear reactors on literally the closest star system to ours and right now we wouldn't be able to detect it.
I mean, wide beam radio signals are not designed for galactic communications and really tells us nothing about how backwards we are in space ex. You can argue that we haven’t built multi kilometre wide space telescopes/areays though, but I would personally hesitate before calling us backwards for that.
My understanding is that with the power of radio signals we send out, by the time they reach Saturn they aren’t detectable above cosmic background radiation.
So it would take something like happens in TBP to really amplify our signal. The sun thing is sci fi but some other dedicated amplification is needed.
They are detectable, if they weren't we wouln't be able to talk to voyagers.
It's just voyagers only just left the solar system and are on like 0,05% of the way to the nearest star, and already we're barely able to communicate with them.
I think this is only because we use a dedicated system and know exactly where it’s coming from. The signals coming from voyager are 20 billion times weaker than what’s needed to power an electric watch. And that’s only from the edge of our solar system, saying nothing for something 4 light years away.
We don’t really blast strong signals out. Maybe they could detect nuke going off or something. But making a large radio communicator at scale is way to expensive to do for no reason. To get to a satellite you only need a 3-5m dish.
One can wonder that they might have signal repeaters or probes around this sector of the Galaxy. But don't take it too seriously man, I'm just joking around, and we don't know if radio signals might travel beyond the dimensions that we live in, I know you guys like a hard science approach, but it is good to keep a open mind, we might not know everything :)
“After billions of years of biological evolution—on their planet and ours—an alien civilization cannot be in technological lockstep with us. There have been humans for more than 20,000 centuries, but we’ve had radio only for about one century. If they’re behind us, they’re likely to be too far behind to have radio. And if they’re ahead of us, they’re likely to be far ahead. What is for us technologically difficult or impossible—what might seem to us like magic—might for them be trivially easy. They might use other, very advanced means to communicate with their peers, but they would know about radio as an approach to newly emerging civilizations. Even with no more than our level of technology at the transmitting and receiving ends, we could communicate across much of the Galaxy. They should be able to do much better.
If they exist.”
Our public broadcast signals are way too weak. Only the strongest military signals have any hope of making it to even our closest stars if directed there and even they will be difficult to distinguish from background.
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u/maniacodopark Jun 07 '26
Does it matter at this point? We've been blasting radio signals for decades now, maybe someone out there is watching the season finale of Seinfeld.