Apparently our radio broadcasts can be listened to in a “space bubble” 200 light years in diameter. That’s huge! But when you compare it to the rest of the Milky Way, um, not really. So just know when you’re hoping an E.T. will find you through your radio broadcasts, he has to be within that bubble to hear you. God, we’re so insignificant. [jacakadamblog via Geekosystem]
Alex
Tuesday, February 8, 2011 at 10:48 PMFor a sense of scale, 200 lightyears is 1/500th the diameter of the Milky way Galaxy, which is one of roughly 100 billion galaxies (I won’t mention the diameter of the Universe, people so often seem to think it’s 28 billion light years). Even if the radio photons weren’t continually scattering off debris, the signal would succumb to quantum effects and become unintelligible – assuming that anything was there to hear it, and then assuming that they recognized it as anything other than random, patternless, sourceless nonsense. The task of translating it is even less feasible.
DansDans
Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 1:03 PMYet in the middle of the city I can barely pick up the SEN transmission, good to know if I was in Jupiter I could listen to it…
…or are we talking about a different radio transmission? if we are, I look foolish now
The Joker
Sunday, February 13, 2011 at 11:41 AMI keep reading comments about how if aliens existed they would have visited us by now or made themselves known to us. This picture puts the utter stupidity of such comments into rather obvious reality…..they don’t even know we’re here and even if they did, it would be up to 200 years before we heard from them.