Hypotheticly yes, but you would need something very big to block the light or reduce it. Planet sized for example, this is one way we detect planets around other stars, by measuring how much the light dims.
Another potential problem is that (at leas according to this wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_galaxies) the closest galaxy is around 33000 light years away. So any signal we send will take 33000 years to get there and any potential return would take the same amount of time, so 66000 years in total. That is far longer than any human civilization exists
Ah sorry, I probably wasn’t clear enough what I meant (and am not super knowledgable here and probably have a western bias). What I meant was civilization defined like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradle_of_civilization not that there weren’t any cultures earlier.
I basically just wanted to say that 66000 years is a very long time in human time scales
First part, wouldnt that only depend on the amount of light that you need to block for them to detect and couldn’t you place the shutter further away to reduce its size?
Also, name a faster way to transmit data intergalaxtically
Edit: also, since we are already transmitting light couldn’t we just send images. If life such as us is who we want to reach wouldnt it only make sense to design for our own light receptors?
Nothing would beat light as far as transmission goes. Also, the further the shutter the further that doesn’t matter. As the galaxy expands you might block light for something that’ll have moved away and miss the signal, so it’s a pretty big risk to try and position this shutter strategically enough to make that work.
However, a fun thing to think about is, after you make your signal thing to broadcast, by the time that message reaches other galaxies, 33k years is long enough that other life might very well have come into existence and evolved.
Even crazier to think someone out there may have already broadcast their own message and we don’t have the means or technology to receive it or notice because they are so many others out there, OR it just hasn’t reached us yet. Maybe in another could thousand years.
I am willing enter the dumbass territory here, but - raido waves, being electromagnetic, and light travel at the same speed. Even if there is technically a difference, it is probably insignifact for the amount of distance each would have to cover before it can effectively transmit anything.
The convenience of a radio signal is that the transmitter is much easier to point in different directions, primarily because it’s a lot smaller than a star, but also because it can (at least in theory) be pointed in directions normally blocked by other celestial bodies. Given the position and orbital physics of a solar system, it would insanely difficult to position something directly “above” or “below” the Sun, let alone something as big and technologically advanced to block enough light, at an adequate frequency, to transmit any data. While a radio transmitter can be launched into space and positioned sufficiently far from other objects in the solar system to send data into various points of space. There can even be multiple such satellites, for all sorts of directions, coupled with repeaters and everything, while we only have one star in the system.
Of course, radio also depends on the receivers, even regardless of the data transmitted, but I believe in aliens, they’ll figure something out.
Sure you can put it farther away, but the sun is massive, it would still need to be pretty big I would guess, but I’m not an astronomer so I don’t know the numbers.
As far as I know we don’t know of any faster way to send signals. That doesn’t make sending the signals impossible, just very impractical.
How about this, we point it at blackholes hoping they act as a worm hole and then are transmitted to people a million years in the past and we instruct them to write the data down on stone tablets so when they advance due to also giving them advance technology they remember to send a note back.
Thats all just math’s. We could create a theoretical model and send enough data where we maximize the probability. All be, the probability would still be starkly low but still an interesting thought experiment.
While radio telescopes are arguably slower then the speed of light, being able to encode and compress data into a radiowave is a faster way to communicate.
Hypotheticly yes, but you would need something very big to block the light or reduce it. Planet sized for example, this is one way we detect planets around other stars, by measuring how much the light dims.
Another potential problem is that (at leas according to this wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_galaxies) the closest galaxy is around 33000 light years away. So any signal we send will take 33000 years to get there and any potential return would take the same amount of time, so 66000 years in total. That is far longer than any human civilization exists
Aboriginal culture is at least 65,000 years old and most likely older.
Ah sorry, I probably wasn’t clear enough what I meant (and am not super knowledgable here and probably have a western bias). What I meant was civilization defined like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradle_of_civilization not that there weren’t any cultures earlier. I basically just wanted to say that 66000 years is a very long time in human time scales
First part, wouldnt that only depend on the amount of light that you need to block for them to detect and couldn’t you place the shutter further away to reduce its size?
Also, name a faster way to transmit data intergalaxtically
Edit: also, since we are already transmitting light couldn’t we just send images. If life such as us is who we want to reach wouldnt it only make sense to design for our own light receptors?
Nothing would beat light as far as transmission goes. Also, the further the shutter the further that doesn’t matter. As the galaxy expands you might block light for something that’ll have moved away and miss the signal, so it’s a pretty big risk to try and position this shutter strategically enough to make that work.
However, a fun thing to think about is, after you make your signal thing to broadcast, by the time that message reaches other galaxies, 33k years is long enough that other life might very well have come into existence and evolved.
Even crazier to think someone out there may have already broadcast their own message and we don’t have the means or technology to receive it or notice because they are so many others out there, OR it just hasn’t reached us yet. Maybe in another could thousand years.
I am willing enter the dumbass territory here, but - raido waves, being electromagnetic, and light travel at the same speed. Even if there is technically a difference, it is probably insignifact for the amount of distance each would have to cover before it can effectively transmit anything.
The convenience of a radio signal is that the transmitter is much easier to point in different directions, primarily because it’s a lot smaller than a star, but also because it can (at least in theory) be pointed in directions normally blocked by other celestial bodies. Given the position and orbital physics of a solar system, it would insanely difficult to position something directly “above” or “below” the Sun, let alone something as big and technologically advanced to block enough light, at an adequate frequency, to transmit any data. While a radio transmitter can be launched into space and positioned sufficiently far from other objects in the solar system to send data into various points of space. There can even be multiple such satellites, for all sorts of directions, coupled with repeaters and everything, while we only have one star in the system.
Of course, radio also depends on the receivers, even regardless of the data transmitted, but I believe in aliens, they’ll figure something out.
Sure you can put it farther away, but the sun is massive, it would still need to be pretty big I would guess, but I’m not an astronomer so I don’t know the numbers.
As far as I know we don’t know of any faster way to send signals. That doesn’t make sending the signals impossible, just very impractical.
How about this, we point it at blackholes hoping they act as a worm hole and then are transmitted to people a million years in the past and we instruct them to write the data down on stone tablets so when they advance due to also giving them advance technology they remember to send a note back.
Sure we can do that, but then we can also just think hard about it and hope anyone hears it, not much of a difference
Thats all just math’s. We could create a theoretical model and send enough data where we maximize the probability. All be, the probability would still be starkly low but still an interesting thought experiment.
While radio telescopes are arguably slower then the speed of light, being able to encode and compress data into a radiowave is a faster way to communicate.
How is radio slower than light? Isn’t it all part of the EM spectrum?
Light is pure energy. While radio is energy it also contains information which means it is slower.
That is not true. The propagation speed of light and radio waves in the same medium is exactly the same. It’s both electromagnetic waves