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The Extent of Human Radio Broadcasts in the Milky Way

by Trey Trawick | 4:16 pm, February 7th, 2011

It’s unlikely that aliens are sitting around fiddling with rabbit ears in attempt to listen to our nonsense, but nevertheless, humans have been sending messages into space for decades. The first AM broadcast was on Christmas Eve, 1906, and Hitler’s broadcasting of the 1936 Olympics is regarded as the first signal powerful enough to be carried into space.

When compared to the vast size of the Milky Way, our presence here on Earth seems insignificant. Even our space-bound messages — which are traveling at the speed of light — are dwarfed by the galaxy’s immensity. The image on the left illustrates our “bubble” of existence, which spans 200 light years in all directions — but is just a small blip on the cosmic radar.

(via jackadam)

  • Guest

    if the first broadcasts were around 1906, would’t that be 100 light years of travel?

  • df

    Yes, so the radius of the sphere is 100 light years, hence a 200 ly diameter.

  • hdcase

    I wonder how long it will take before the signals are degraded and absorbed by space dust, meteors, and other obstacles or simply sucked in by dark matter & black holes and no longer exist.

  • Guest

    it says it spans 200 light years in all directions, if the radius is 100 light years, wouldn’t it span 100 light years in all directions? and 200 light years end to end?

  • Anonymous

    So let’s say that in 20 more years one of our radio signals is picked up by some extraterrestrial life form.  It would take their government decades to agree on what to do about it.  But it will spend no time deciding that the general public has no right to know.
    Then, it would have to bicker about how to fund a mission to travel to the source of the signal.  Everyone’s pensions will be raided in the name of fighting evil, energy, healthcare, etc.
    Then half way through their critical endeavor funding will be cut because the uninformed population has grown too restless and is on brink of revolt.

    My money is on never ever hearing a word from “out there”.

    We have too many local problems to concern ourselves with.  Who cares if there are other life forms so far away that we could never communicate with each other.  Our communication transmissions will take more than 400 years to make a round trip. 

    But maybe if we spend enough money we can overcome the technical and physical limitations.  YES!  JUST MAYBE!

    And hopefully these advanced civilizations can tell us how to shrink the size of government.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=508692936 Jeremy Schmidt

    Ben, you really shouldn’t assume other worlds are as chaotic as ours. Other species could have organizations like ants, all beating to the same drum.

  • Js29549

    imagine for a sec your an alien life form of some sort, and your cruising along with your vastly superior technology and all of a sudden Hitler’s ugly face pops up and starts yapping about racial superiority; whats the first thing that you would do? I know what i would do. EMERGENCY BROADCAST: QUARANTINE ENTIRE SECTOR UNTIL SPECIES SELF-DESTRUCTS!!!   (or better yet send unoccupied observation drones to learn how to NOT behave)


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