(July 15, 2025 at 12:51 am)Thumpalumpacus Wrote:(July 14, 2025 at 9:38 pm)Ravenshire Wrote: Fair enough, but there's also this:
If you threw a dart at the map of the Milky Way, and wherever that dart landed is where an advanced alien species resides, there would be a cosmically small probability that they live close enough to be aware of our existence. Even if you threw 100 darts, it's a near certainty that none would land in the little blue bubble of our radio waves.
A 200 ly bubble, while it is a mind bendingly large volume of space at human scale, is a mere rounding error at the galactic scale.
Absolutely agreed, but these radio waves aren't darts flung out at random. NORAD emissions, which are 24/7, are thrown all over the sky. If there's a capable civilization with 70 or so lys, their reception is likely, assuming that capability is actually in place. And that bubble will only grow with time.
Especially nowadays, there's a constant emission pattern we give off that would provide any other technological species decent baseline and therefore insight. Whether there's any civilization in reach and capable is clearly not evidenced at all -- but if they're there, we can be analyzed.
The difficulty is that there isn't likely to be a civilization like ours within 200 light years. It has to be advanced enough to be capable of detecting our radio waves but primitive enough to still think that they're cool. Consider that just 100 years ago we barely had radio. We'd just finished fighting The Great War, Pluto hadn't been discovered, and H.G. Wells hadn't terrified the public with his War of the Worlds broadcast. I can't begin to speculate on where we'll be 100 years from now, but it's good odds that one way or another we won't be using this EM rubbish. 200 years out of billions isn't even a flash in the pan. We aren't consequential on the scales of the cosmos.
