geekosystem

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

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.

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.

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)

Our “audible” transmissions began with Hitler’s address, which is (by 2012) a 5.5 million mile thick (30 sec) and 0.9 quadrilion mile diameter (2 x 76 light year radius) sphere of “30 seconds-detectable” vocal auditory radio emission. Not much to detect, nor for very long a duration. Moreover, “hdcase” is correct that the amplitude of the original signal is weak, and at its current diameter has decreased to the point that it would be inaudible to most radio dishes used by any technologically equivalent alien culture. For us to communicate to an alien radio dish like ours at Aricebo or SETI, our transmission power must start off much greater.

However, in 100-200 years, once we’ve developed — or if we develop, “BenDoverPls” — the capacity for high-power directional radio or laser-light binary transmissions directed toward extrasolar Goldilocks-zone planets we’ve detected by then, there would be no need to have a “conversation” with any alien culture potentially located there. We need only start talking TO the planet — first by sending imagery of our math, picture, language, encyclopedic and science books, then by sending our hardware & software specs to permit downloading and housing of our biological culture’s descendant A.I. personalities or our own individual “Google glasses-uploaded” A.I. avatars, and then by launching our A.I.s’ and avatars’ codes themselves — and, voila! Our A.I.s and avatars have just interstellar-traveled to another world. (Later, any intelligent races that happened to have heard and followed our transmissions could build their own interstellar radio transmitter to return experientially-updated copies of our A.I. and avatar ambassadors back to Sol, along with their own cultural memes and A.I. ambassadors, so that Earth can more fully experience their alien culture and personalities.)

So the upshot is that we could indeed communicate between and even travel between the stars, at the speed of light — if we define “we” without our current bias toward carbon rather than silicon consciousnesses.

I think that they already have. Most claims I have read about it say most likely less than 2 lights years before they are so weak they are washed out by background noise. Some really high power transmissions may make it 3 or 4. One claim I read said that if all the power on Earth was used to send a single into space even it would not make to to the 5 light year mark. So they are never going to hear us and we are never going to hear them. And on top of that would they even recognize a signal from Earth if they did by chance fly close enough to pick one up?. Would we recognize a signal from a signal from them?