Let's recap how this started: I made a comment that lasers would work well for interstellar communications, you have done nothing since then except snarkily try to harp on all the ways that this isn't true ("they won't stay collimated", "they would perform essentially the same as dipole emitters", "who ever heard of a raser" even though I didn't say anything about rasers and was talking about normal visible-light lasers, then "RF masers aren't the kind of rasers I was asking about because their radio emissions aren't long-wave enough", etc.).
If you aren't trying to claim that interstellar communications by laser isn't impossible/infeasible/pointless, then great, we agree! But then if that's the case, I also don't know why you've been posting the things you've been posting thus far. I'm content to drop it, though. Again, I didn't start this thread to hash out which specific method of interstellar communications is best.
Right, hence my earlier statement: "Of course, again, who knows how much longer we will last as a civilization capable of receiving radio signals."Originally Posted by sycld
Right, hence my earlier statement: "Again, based just on the example of human history which of course might not be anything like a representative norm."Originally Posted by sycld
Right, hence my earlier statement (again) that we really have no idea how much longer human civilization will last with the ability to communicate between stars.Originally Posted by sycld
I've never once used human civilization as a guideline to guess about other civilizations without also clearly qualifying those guesses with the points you have needlessly reiterated here. Speaking of not bothering to read posts....
We can (of course) only detect a signal if it hits the dishes of our radio telescopes. Which means that, yes, alien civilizations in other star systems would most likely have to be deliberately squirting high-powered radio, laser, etc. transmissions at other star systems (including ours) in order for us to detect them. And yep, one of the explanations for the "Great Silence" is that maybe other civilizations exist but aren't interested in doing that sort of thing (perhaps for practical/strategic reasons; there is a fairly sound argument that an intelligent species revealing it's presence to other such species is inviting an attack aimed at exterminating them). Certainly we ourselves haven't done it very seriously, yet. So, a good point.Originally Posted by mrbazoun
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