Would Aliens Scanning Their Skies, Searching For Life On Other Planets, Easily Find Our Transmissions?

[sandyRoe]

Do we beam like a lighthouse across the empty infinity of space?

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other/stephen-hawking-launches-dollar100m-search-for-alien-life-beyond-solar-system/ar-AAdePAE

[Bazile]

You know these people who say that they have had an encounter with aliens landing on the earth .

How come it's always in the dead of night , in the middle of nowhere .

Why haven't any of these aliens landed in a Asda car park during daylight ? ( other supermarket car parks are available )

[EDDIE51]

Forgot Mars which is the best candidate for a potentially habitable planet well under 0.01LY !

[EDDIE51]

Not only that they are normally so stupid they can hardly hold a conversation! Bazile.

[Old_Geezer]

"How come it's always in the dead of night , in the middle of nowhere ."

Would you march in, in full view, on a primitive planet with a violent dominant species ? No way. You'd be using your probes on the local fauna in far out places where you would be undisturbed.

[TWR]

Would any persons / Alien's in their right mind want to contact a race that's intent of destroying itself?

[Bazile]

//Would you march in, in full view, on a primitive planet with a violent dominant species ? No way. You'd be using your probes on the local fauna in far out places where you would be undisturbed.//

Well it all depends on the level of advancement of the visiting species (and given that they can travel such distances , overcoming the various obstacles , would mean that they would be well in advance of us humans )

Thus they are likely to know beforehand of the capability of the hosts , without having to land and do any physical probing on the local carbon dwelling species .

[ToraToraTora]

No, mainly because all our radio transmissions in history, even at the speed of light, have barely reached the garden gate in Cosmic terms. Even if the whole earth was a transmitter, at a distance of even a few light years the dissipation would mean that any alien listening would only pick up the odd photon per cubic light year. Not even noticable. As I have explained many times the galaxy is teeming with life that we will never encounter in any way.

[EDDIE51]

Best 'Earth Match' planet yet just announced by Nasa , but it is 1400LY out so a bit of a communication problem! 2800 years to get a return message!

[DJHawkes]

i hope kepler 2 has A will smith lookee likey or a bruce willis clone that will fight us off when we try to invade and take it over after we've destroyed this one.

[tonyav]

sandy, they have picked up the signals !.
http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other/airline-passenger-films-apparent-ufo-over-the-alps/vi-AAdlzpv

[Khandro]

I believe Dixon of Dock Green is going down a storm on Fomalhaut b, but the *** continue to refuse paying royalties.

[Colmc54]

Old Geezer hello,
Have you been reading Firefall by Peter Watts? Just finished it myself and I agree there's a 'good' chance we've been invaded already! How would we know?

There's this thing called the inverse square law that states that any signal e.g. radio or TV gets profoundly weaker the further it travels.

Putting my science head on briefly (as I much prefer my Sci-Fi hat most of the time) I would say in terms of the age of the universe and the proximity of our star to it's start it is highly unlikely that any stars like ours, capable of allowing the possibility of sentient species to evolve that are capable of inventing radio or TV communications detectable by us is statistically as close to zero as makes no difference.

PS don't tell the science funders that, or Hollywood either!

[Colmc54]

Peter Watts proposes a kind of semi-autonomous alien panspermia I believe. Firefall is best read on Kindle where you can press and hold on an unfamiliar word like echopraxia for instance and find the meaning.

Scientists writing science fiction, funding must be tough these days! I loved reading it but, in the total absence of any fossil remains I was challenged by his proposed biotech resurrection of the vampire branch of our species. But I loved the idea of the 'anti-euclidean drugs they had to take to avoid the 'Crucifix Glitch'!