Study examines best way for aliens to contact Earth
- Thread starter spaminator
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:lol:
You can take a string, find your center point and walk a perfect circle and mark it.
Wiltshire (where else?) 2004
beautiful countryside btw.
Ain't nobody coming here and ain't nobody trying to communicate. Our placement pretty much puts us in a galactic backwater. Us and Alpha Centauri are the only two star systems within 75 square light years. And when applying inverse square law, any radio signals we have sent out that have made it that far, have been so badly degraded that it would be extremely difficult to make out any intelligent signal over the noise of the background radiation.
If you travel outwards from our system to a distance of a few hundred light years and looked back at where you came from, you'd basically see an area of blackness amongst all the stars.
This is why I sometimes wonder if we really are the only ones out there. It's not just our placement within the solar system that's important, nor the size of the planet. There's also a so-called "Goldilocks zone" within our galaxy (maybe more than one). What that means is we're far enough away from all the hectic activity that goes on throughout the rest of the galaxy that life has a chance to not only come to be, but thrive and multiply and diversify. If you have a bunch of stars in your neighbourhood going nova every few million years, the chaos is going to wreak havoc on any life on nearby planets.
We're also far enough out that we benefit from heavier metals and rare earth elements, both essential to advanced civilizations. Whether we're truly advanced is up for debate but the potential is there. However, any farther out and finding water in any form could be a problem.
There's actually quite a few turning points that need to happen in order for life to form on a planet, and even more for it to strive and diversify. While the odds of it happening more than once aren't impossible, they are astronomical.
If you travel outwards from our system to a distance of a few hundred light years and looked back at where you came from, you'd basically see an area of blackness amongst all the stars.
This is why I sometimes wonder if we really are the only ones out there. It's not just our placement within the solar system that's important, nor the size of the planet. There's also a so-called "Goldilocks zone" within our galaxy (maybe more than one). What that means is we're far enough away from all the hectic activity that goes on throughout the rest of the galaxy that life has a chance to not only come to be, but thrive and multiply and diversify. If you have a bunch of stars in your neighbourhood going nova every few million years, the chaos is going to wreak havoc on any life on nearby planets.
We're also far enough out that we benefit from heavier metals and rare earth elements, both essential to advanced civilizations. Whether we're truly advanced is up for debate but the potential is there. However, any farther out and finding water in any form could be a problem.
There's actually quite a few turning points that need to happen in order for life to form on a planet, and even more for it to strive and diversify. While the odds of it happening more than once aren't impossible, they are astronomical.
where did you find this number? There are still quite a few within 75 light years
I don't remember, the calls are usually late at night, when I'm plastered. It's usually foriegn sounding females.
Yeah, I got that confused with something else. Our local area is about 16 light years across and contains 56 stellar systems with a total of 60 hydrogen fusing stars. However, of those 60 stars, 50 of them are red dwarfs. The rest are a mix of brown and white dwarf stars.
The other 10 hydrogen fusing stars are certainly close enough that if there were inhabited planets that had the tech, they would have picked up some kind of signal from earth.
Likewise, if they did exist and had a means of electronic communication, we'd have likely picked up something from them by now as well.
The reference to the blackness one would see if you travelled away from our local area is because from our current vantage point, only 12% of the stars in our local area are visible to the naked eye. So as one travelled farther out, fewer stars would be visible to the naked eye in our local area.
Ah, now I remember where the 75 light years came from. IIRC, that's about as far as a radio signal from Earth can travel before it becomes completely indistinguishable from the noise of background radiation. That means that if there is intelligent life within 75 cubic light years of Earth, they likely aren't an advanced civilization.