Earth's "radio bubble" is well over 100 light years across now. If there are aliens out there, they are probably already on their way to ask us in person why Ross, the largest Friend, doesn't simply eat the others.
Radio signals do weaken and dissipate over time and space. Broadcast signals could fade into the cosmic microwave background in a few light years depending on their strength. The sci-fi trope of aliens picking up Earth tv and radio just isn't plausible.
No, we don't. If you're talking about SETI, that's looking at radio signals. If you're talking about killer asteroid early-warning detection, we generally don't have the capacity to reliably detect voyager-sized asteroids even in our own solar system, let alone in interstellar space.
Imagine how far technology has come in 100 years. Then imagine if the alien had just a 1 million year head start to technology. 1 million years is less than 1/1000 of the age of the universe earlier.
We have literally no idea what technology the alien could have.
Maybe there are aliens out there so advanced that they could be reading our screens right now in realtime from across the galaxy using some weird post-quantum silly sauce we can't even comprehend. But it doesn't seem likely given what we do know and observe, at least not to me (based mostly on the Fermi Paradox and thermodynamics) that there is someone 100 light years away teasing I Love Lucy from the CMB. It seems less likely that they would be able to pinpoint our location based on that, and try to annihilate us.
The aliens have the same physics we do. Science isn't magic. Without quite literally having to replace everything we have known or discovered in the past 250 years from entropy to electromagnetic theory to gravity to motion with brand new theories that somehow equally explain all known phenomenon while also allowing lots of outright magic, no, the aliens are not able to collect radio waves from below the noise floor.
> The aliens have the same physics we do. Science isn't magic.
Show a spacecraft to someone from the middle ages and they would think it's magic.
There is physics that has not been discovered. Lots of things are still unexplained.
> no, the aliens are not able to collect radio waves from below the noise floor
Before we had quadrature modulation and quadrature phase shift keying, we thought we had hit the noise floor for wireless bandwidth. After we thought we really hit the ceiling, we had beamforming. There's stuff that hasn't been thought of. We don't know the unknown unknowns.
After the transition to digital TV our broadcasted signals mostly look like noise, though. Maybe an outside observer would assume that our civilization ended sometime in 2010.
Analogue TV would not be much better. How would the aliens know they're supposed to shoot an electron raygun left-to-right 486 times across a screen, then ignore the next 39 lines, then repeat this 29.97 times a second? And that's before you get into interlacing, horizontal blanking intervals, line 21, luma and chroma (encoded by reference to human eyesight), or different standards altogether like PAL or SECAM, etc.
Analogue TV has always felt so much more clever than digital TV to me, at least from a purely technical standpoint. I guess that's because we're mostly digital natives now, so video codecs seem ordinary and programmable electron rayguns do not.
You can still see from far away that our planet's atmosphere has a very unusual chemical composition that's far out of equilibrium.
We are already using spectroscopy to gain insights into the chemical composition of exo-planets, and we have barely begun doing this kind of research. In even just a few decades we'll be massively better at this.
Funny enough I was eating a Sumo as I came across your comment. They are certainly very tasty, but for the price (which is high at least here in Ohio) I much prefer the tartness of a traditional in-season California satsuma.
All the California satsumas I can find here in California have all converged on the dekopon/Sumo taste and form. It’s confusing because the satsumas on Google images are still mostly the round ones without the bumps.
The prices vary wildly. At the end of the season I can find them in some ethnic grocers for $0.33 a pound while right now they’re $1.50-2 a pound. When they were first coming out years ago they were $4 a piece at Trader Joes.
There are dekopon trees that give fruit with the bump and without the bump. You may be finding the ones without the bump. But satsumas have a different enough flavor that you should be able to tell. Also, satsumas are smaller, more oblong, and tend to have a thinner skin.
It depends on the season, but they tend to have too much acid at first. Leaving them in the fridge reduces the acid over time improves the flavor profile. But really you should refrigerate all citrus.
Less offensive than a completely meaningless forced "please" and "thank you" coming from an employee who only does it because if they don't they are punished.
FWIW the "rule of law" is a reference to the idea that the law should be applied equally to everyone regardless of their position in society, and has nothing to do with the crime rate.
No. Catching murderers (for example) is a basic function of the justice system. Of course the US justice system does have many flaws and in some ways much worse lately, but compare with Somalia or Haiti and you'll see that there's quite a long way down. It could get much worse.
I solved a problem (not really the same problem as this, mind you) for my family
using a much older technology. I bought a big pane of glass from the hardware store,
built a wooden frame for it with a shelf for an eraser and dry markers.
I hung it up in the kitchen and now when we need to leave "sticky" notes to each
other we just write on it. We keep our shopping list on it, we write small poems
and draw funny faces. It has become a fun ephemeral space for communicating.
Cool idea! At some point I was musing about making or buying a dashboard tool like in the post, but over the years I found that I dont actually need the complexity that comes with it.
An analogue communication medium for myself and others is indeed something that might be much more impactful and human-cetric than a smart system.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/LNXGF/
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