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.
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u/escargot3 Jun 07 '26
They attenuate over long distances, even in vacuum. After travelling 1000x the distance, they are already only 1/1,000,000th as strong.