(May 10, 2019 at 10:30 pm)polymath257 Wrote:(May 10, 2019 at 10:05 pm)Fireball Wrote: Beside all the possibilities of life forming and developing, one thing to think about as far as beings getting detected via electromagnetic emissions is the means of that emission. We went from spark gap Morse Code to digital spread spectrum in a little over a hundred years. We use DSS to help limit detection, along with encryption. Except for stupid shit like "I Love Lucy", we haven't radiated all that much, especially when one considers that it mostly bounces off the ionosphere, and decays at an inverse square law rate when it does leak through. The means of communication through space are rapidly evolving, and mitigate against detection via remote entities.
And just from the perspective of power usage, it is reasonable to limit the spread of any emission you make.
of course, there is also the question of whether EM radiation is the preferred method of communication.
Based on our understanding of physics, there are certain things, such as probing quantum world at extremely tiny scale, that in principle can only be done with expenditure of ever more enormous amount of energy. The law of thermodynamics says there is in principle a limit to how efficient such expenditure of energy can be. So there is an argument that as civilization become more advanced then ours, it will inevitably leak ever more in principle unavoidable waste energy, most likely in the form of EM.
