Dang if I was an alien I would be pretty pissed...

[destrekor]

Originally posted by: astroidea

Originally posted by: destrekor
do we honestly think every possible intelligent lifeform can understand binary (base2?) It sounds simple to us, because that's how our society developed. Hell, right now we think water is necessary for life. Theoretically, life could evolve to incorporate liquid methane for all we know and have extremely low body temperatures.

The point is that, with pure logic and reasoning(the aptitude that intelligence is benchmarked on), an intelligence high enough would have the capacity to infer the factbook of human life that is enigmatized into that binary radio sequence.

your tech speak is almost too much for me.... almost.
we are not nearly as intelligent as everyone thinks we are. We are purely problem-solving creatures. Everything that has come from us has been a solution to a problem. Logically, we shouldn't believe in deities, yet we do. To me, I think we can only refer to ourselves as intelligent when we move past belief in deities and move towards a collective-based society. Think of how much we could accomplish at that point? Hell, our bodies were designed to die around age 30-40, and we extend lives beyond that with medicine but have not conquered a lot of the problems that plague our bodies after those ages. Oxygen causes degradation of our cells and DNA structure, and our cells start to get a little crazy when we get old. Life should only be years of productivity. Most people at older ages don't do too much. We need to figure out how to make life better up through those ages, and at the same time we'll extend our lifespan ever further. Those ages will be bad too, but if we can get ourselves to still be moderately youthful at age 70 and able to do things, we should. But then again, would we enjoy life? Although life wasn't meant to be enjoyable... okay I'm ranting endlessly and pointlessly now, and really just rambling. lol

my point being, other lifeforms that are 'intelligent' could interpret life in a completely different way, and have a completely different understanding of their place in the universe.
I actually wanna see life in the other universes. Science actually predicts, if other universes exist, that the laws of physics as we know them could be completely backwards for all we know there. Things could have developed differently in those universes and it could be interesting to see how things shaped up there. I want to go there.
We need FTL travel dammit!

 

[destrekor]

Originally posted by: Eli

Originally posted by: bsobel

Originally posted by: funkymatt
most television and radio signals dont make it much further than our solar system.

Sorry, you fail at physics Now the antennas required to detect them is a different matter...

I was going to say.. what exactly is going to stop them? lol

redshifting and cosmic radiation could distort, and in the latter case completely disrupt their travel too through interference. It is likely any light waves created here will not reach far away destinations in wavelengths that at all resemble what they do here.

(i have a very limited knowledge of astrophysics, mostly I understand quite a few concepts but don't know how to calculate a lot of them, and some concepts at this point are completely over my head. string theory? bah fuck me. i don't understand that shit at all. :laugh

 

[pontifex]

Originally posted by: invidia
We need to send out a rick roll in binary encryption.

i don't know why but that made me lol.
i can just see the aliens sitting there in their spaceships.

Alien1: Sir! We've got an unknown incoming transmission.
Alien2: Put it on the screen.
Alien1: Yes, sir!
Alien2: Aw, fuck!

 

[destrekor]

Originally posted by: pontifex

Originally posted by: invidia
We need to send out a rick roll in binary encryption.

i don't know why but that made me lol.
i can just see the aliens sitting there in their spaceships.

Alien1: Sir! We've got an unknown incoming transmission.
Alien2: Put it on the screen.
Alien1: Yes, sir!
Alien2: Aw, fuck!

i LOL'd

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: destrekor
redshifting and cosmic radiation could distort, and in the latter case completely disrupt their travel too through interference. It is likely any light waves created here will not reach far away destinations in wavelengths that at all resemble what they do here.

(i have a very limited knowledge of astrophysics, mostly I understand quite a few concepts but don't know how to calculate a lot of them, and some concepts at this point are completely over my head. string theory? bah fuck me. i don't understand that shit at all. :laugh

Voyager 1 has a 20 watt radio transmitter, one which is unidirectional, which greatly helps to maintain its strength. The signal strength is generally quoted as being 20 billion times weaker than a watch battery.

Voyager's distance from Earth:
9,826,000,000 miles, as of December, 2007.

The nearest star system is over 4 light years away, with about 5.88 trillion miles in one light year.
Since Earth's transmissions generally go out in all directions, that greatly reduces the signal strength over distances - it weakens exponentially with distance. Aliens wouldn't know what to be listening for, so any signal getting through would likely just blend in with the background noise. Unless of course they have a really dedicated exploration project, with huge space-based antenna arrays pointed at each planet in nearby star systems, sweeping the frequency spectrum looking for anything of interest.