Sending messages into space

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Tight beam casting. A laser might do it.

ruveyn

True, but then only something directly line-of-sight can receive the signal. It won't be "broadcasting." Even then, light based communications are prone to diffraction (skims a planet's atmosphere, goes through the tail of a comet, etc.) which can degrade the signal to nothing.

We need a type of "radio" signal which can be broadcast but doesn't degrade over distance (at least not in the same way radio waves do).

Hydrogen Gas when hit with radio waves at a specific frequency emits those radio waves at that frequency, and so your message can propagate to a greater distance.

Seeking contact with ET is a bad Idea, if they respond they will not want to "phone home". they will arrive with the same intentions as the War of the Worlds extraterrestrials, or like the extraterrestrials from Independence Day.

well folks, I'd love to be wrong... Laser light is coherent light; however it does spread, just not nearly as much.

I think a beam on the moon is just feet apart (we left a laser mirror [columnator? Can't remember] on the moon), that they used to send laser signals to.

The trick is to have 2 civilizations -
at roughly the same level of civilization;
close enough to send a message to
on two planets that support intelligent life (so far most of the planets we've found are Jovian-size. Not that there aren't Earth-size planets, we just haven't found them yet)

the odds may be long, but I doubt they're 0

Line of sight or line of transmission is implicit in the term "beam casting".

ruveyn

You could use a beam splitter, perhaps, or a whole bunch of lasers to point at a whole bunch of the nearer stars (say narrow it down to the nearest hundred single G or K class stars); that would be more effective than a single point source or laser.



We're still getting the signal (just) from the Voyagers, which are billions of miles out (which is, admittedly, still not very far). I guess the ISM might scatter and generally disrupt any signal over huge distances, though?

I'll grant that we're picking up Voyager, but remember
a) we know the exact frequency
b) we have already established a communications protocol
c) we also have the precise location

So the trick is to figure out how to communicate, and using what protocols, etc. We could be getting 7 billion channels of galactic crap right now, we just don't know how to decipher it...

Radio waves don't degrade. Static can add so much noise to the that it is hard
to hear, but they are redundant and the static is not so it can be cancelled out.
Cancelling out the static becomes easier just by having 2 or 3 antennas.
Radio telescopes can see where light can't go. There are many dishes that
scan the sky as the earth spins, and even as the earth goes all the way around
the sun. That is like a 93 x 2 million mile wide camera. When all the signal is
processed the noise cancels out and an image of the sky can be produced.
When analog TVs used to hiss and make gray noise on the screen, about
10% of that non-broadcast channel was from outer space, and once a
satelliet dish on earth discovered the background radiation of the universe,
although COBE and other satellites were able to make a more detailed image
of the relative heat of the sky just after the big bang. That signal was the
first light in the universe which got stretched as it expanded, and the longer
waves than light are radio waves, as old as the universe, but still has a
picture of it.

I do question whether the picture is still anything like what would have
been taken in the beginning because there are all kinds of effects on the
signal, for one thing it is inside out, and we see way out there what it
looked like when everything was close to here, and the further out we
look, the more things have been distorted by gravity, and when the
universe was small, light had traveled around the whole universe
(three times I believe) before reaching earth today. I mentioned that
before, that most of what we see in the sky never was where it looks
like it is, and probably blew up a long time ago and light from the
explosion hasn't reached us yet. The nearest star is seen where it
was more than 4 (light) years ago, so it could be gone now and
we wouldn't know for that long.

Thus, even earth's radio stations might be heard by aliens after the
sun blows up, so radio waves are not that bad. It is easy to listen to
astronauts on the space station with an ordinary scanner, and sometimes
baby monitors pick up the frequency. Satellite TV seems to work OK
going one tenth of the way to the moon and back. The dish works like
a radio telescope, focusing all the signal from the satellite that hits the
dish onto the antenna so it gets many many times more (1000x?)
of the signal power than the antenna can get all by itself.

Anyone slightly ahead of us would be sending in 3-D. All the other animals are telepathic.

What we are claiming as background static left over from the Big Bang, which was 15,000,000,000 years ago, might just be the GlactaVision Channel, and we are just not smart enough to decode it. But like all pay per view, it would come scrambled, which fits what we are getting, easy to get with a small radio wave scope. Telepathic would have to be scrambled, or everyone would get weird.

We could be getting Holodeck feed, we would never know it.

We must focus on remedial science for hairless ground apes, and intelligence as a second language.

Even if we do pick out the signals, learn to decode, build the right reciever, the content will be in a language we have never heard, from a non human voice, species, and that might take a while to figure out. What is that reptile hissing about?

Look before you leap.

The letters that Europeans use originally were pictograms, each letter was a picture of something.

I have it on good authority that if you turn the letter 'A' upside down ii vaguely resembles a cow's head The extraterrrestrials might eat differently shaped creatures.

the letter 'W' was supposed to be a representation of water, that letter 'W' might be understood by Extra-terrestrials. All the life we know about requires liquid water to exist.

Hieroglyphs are a nighmare to decipher, they ony reason Egyptian hieroglyphics are understood is because of the discovery of the "Rosetta Stone". The object had translation of Egyptian Hieroglyphics to Greek.

Suppose those aliens have four fingers per hand, then they would not use a numbering system based on ten.

All we know about ET is the "WOW" signal that could only have had an intelligent creature sending it

I'm not entirely sure that they don't - well, obviously the light itself doesn't degrade, though it may be scattered or absorbed by the ISM - but I've got a nagging memory that FM signal packets get smeared together somehow over very long distances, I just can't remember any more than that.



M not W, apparently, but aren't they cute?

Piccies


If you can prove that, there's a million dollars in it for you.



The CMB was predicted to exist before it was (accidentally) discovered, and its anisotropy is predicted by theoretical models. It isn't alien static, sadly.

http://www.sumerian.org/prot-sum.htm

http://www.ancientscripts.com/sumerian.html

the Hebrew letter aleph, the first of their alphabet vaguely resembles an oxe's head
beth the second letter of the Hebrew Alphabet means house