The Great Silence -Are We the Miss Lonely Hearts of the Milky Way?
Dennis Overbye, author of Lonely Hearts of he Cosmos wrote a brilliant essay in the Sunday New York Times about the probability of discovering intelligent, advanced technological civilization in our Galaxy. Overbye quotes Francis Drake, father of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial life, who says that to hear from ET we would "need to look at 10 million stars (there are 200 billion in our galaxy) and there is not enough time left."
Drake goes on to point out that contrary to popular wisdom which believes that we could discover the existence of extraterrestrials from powerful beacons beamed our way from their vastly advanced civilizations, that if we use the Earth is an case study, that the more advanced the civilization, the less likely they are to emit powerful radio waves. With our evolution to cable and satellite transmissions, we are now leaking very little out to space. The earth is gradually becoming "radio quiet" in a cosmic blink of the eye.
"That's the big change nobody anticipated," Overbye continues quoting Drake. "Once the powerful transmitters go off the air 'we will still exist but we will be hard to detect.' "
Posted by Casey Kazan.
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Dennis Overbye: Please Call Earth. We Still Haven't Found You.
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Well, that runs the other way too, what would be the "time region" of a radio signaling civilization? That is the SETI basic principle.
Posted by: jer35_mx | March 04, 2008 at 08:01 AM
Even if we use fiber - optics & satellites for transmission, it seems reasonable to expect some leakage of stray radio waves even if they were pointed at earth instead of space. & what of the Arecibo telescope & the VLA radio telescope near Soccoro, NM ? Even if they're passive observers, wouldn't there be some kind of energy signature, albeit faint, from them ? What about the Deep Space Network monitoring various space probes ? There'd be some kind of energy signature, wouldn't there ? Likewise for an extraterrestrial civilization.
Posted by: knoxvilledaniel | March 04, 2008 at 08:36 PM