this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
553 points (98.1% liked)
memes
16285 readers
3123 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Supposedly our 200-ish year old bubble of lightspeed radio signals now encompasses 75 star systems. Unfortunately the signal gets diminished over distance thanks to the inverse square rule, so they’d maybe receive a signal but not be able to distinguish it from the CMB.
I don't think we're sure what makes it and what doesn't. Some of the first radio broadcasts were very strong and maybe even directed more, but over time due to competition limits were put on transmission power. Then there's the question of general direction vs. a directed beam which would have more distance before it gets lost. Lastly, lower bandwidths were used as technology modernized, which would hide more in the background.
But even if the strongest part gets to a planet and lasts for years, what if their time to invent and use radio is still far in the future, or gone in the past and they don't even look in those frequencies. It could be more a matter of timing than anything else.
I still wait for the darkly humorous joke until it really happens message to us, "Shhhh, they'll hear you."
The radio signals were essentially point source, so they’ll still dissipate. I’m not going to do the math, but like you said, others would need to be listening with the right gear at the right time to catch a signal and need a really impressive array to catch it. Yeah, the Dark Forest concept would be darkly funny.