Quote:
Originally Posted by darkskybondi
If there is ET life, why wouldn't they use radio?
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Why wouldn't they use radio??!!
Look at it this way, we've had radio for about 100 years and quite frankly, for long range communications the technology has reached its end. You can't do too much more with it in so far as speed and bandwidth goes. You could do some more with the bandwidth, but then how far do you split the spectrum up and at what cost?? The speed...that's a given.
Now, it's true that it's nominally cheap and efficient for short range communications, but who wants to wait years, decades, centuries or even millenia for replies during conversations. It not only makes conversation or data transfer tedious and inefficient, but also expensive in the medium to long term. What we need is a high speed, large bandwidth, data dense communications system that will allow us to communicate with anyone within the galaxy, or even beyond, in as short a time as possible. Say 2 way communications across the galaxy within a few hours (for direct to destination communications). You might say that's impossible, Einstein says so. But you have to consider that in reality, we actually know "jack" about very little. Einstein is not the be all and end all of physics, despite what you hear and what you're taught. I would doubt very much that a civilisation even as little as 100-200 years ahead of where we are now would be using radio and/or lasers for interstellar communication. A civilisation 500, 1000 or even 1,000,000 years ahead would consider radio and lasers as something akin to flint knives and stone axes. They'd be museum pieces.
Even within the Solar System, radio and lasers have their limitations. It's pretty much hopeless when you get two way communications times exceeding an hour or more. What happens if you're out near Pluto and something goes wrong at your base or ship. It takes 5.5 hours for the radio signal or laser beam to travel to Earth and then 5.5 hours back. Not too great when time is of the essence in an emergency and it requires help from home to resolve the problems at hand. Even if you have a base in Neptune orbit, the signals are going to take anywhere from 1.5 to 9 hours for the signals to reach there (between Neptune and Pluto), depending on where they are in their orbits. I'd hate to be hanging out for a reply when my life depended upon what was going to be said. Even if you were 90-100% reliant on your own efforts, sometimes that's not enough.
We're barely out of the stone age....expecting another civilisation to use the same methods to commumicate as we do, given that they're most probably many years ahead of us, is bordering on the absurd. Most of the scientists talking about this should know better.