Slashdot Mirror
SETI Finds Interesting Signal
Several readers sent in notes about an interesting signal discovered by SETI. No real evidence of Someone Out There, but not fully explainable either. Another reader submits a blurb suggesting that aliens should send spacemail, not signals: "Rutgers electrical engineering professor, Christopher Rose, has an article on Nature magazine's cover today describing the most efficient way for our civilization to be discovered by aliens. On this question of better to 'write or radiate', his conclusions: better not to send radio transmission, when physical media like DNA on an asteroid can declare a terrestrial presence. Similar to what motivated Voyager scientists to attach a plaque for the outbound trip. Rose has some great information payload sizes as examples (like the entire information equivalent for our global genome fitting on a 100 pound laptop!)."
I think the idea is that the Aliens would turn the fucking thing on.
Yes but what you loss in strength you make up for in speed. Radio waves move at light speed, objects fired into space move at best currently (I'm too lazy to look it up right now).
The 1/r^2 also mean that you are covering the entire surface of the sphere (minus signal loss and blockage)an area of 4(pi)r^2 where as an object fired into space has a pretty small cross section comparitively.
It might not be the easiest to understand and it may weaken out to nothing, but a radio wave makes up for it in speed and volume. Kind of like standing around waiting to get hit with a newspaper or turning on a TV/radio and flipping channel, one's a whole lot more likely to get results where ever you are.
Very very good point. (I would mod you up if I could...)