Reply to post: Re: Good luck with that

With intelligent life in scant supply on Earth, boffins search for technosignatures of civilizations in the galaxy

Nick Ryan Silver badge

Re: Good luck with that

I'd say simplistic and naieve. There would only be a very short period of time for any society to be in the state that's looking for. Even our own EM emissions are drastically reduced now we have better broadcast technology but even if you rounded things up to 100 years of high powered directionless broadcasts, that's a very small window of time that another culture has to be within reasonable of range of these transmissions and to be looking for them. A 100 year sliding window in a galaxy that is already around 13.5 billion years old? Just not going to happen, or if it does, it's a phenomenal piece of luck. A culture looking for other cultures would have to monitor many thousands of systems for many thousands of years and would still have to be incredibly lucky. Human development within the time frame of vertebrate life on Earth is pretty much a rounding error.

Our search for life should involve better and better telescopes, of varying frequencies, to look for potential signs of life, as in chemically unstable anomolies where non-routine processes are affecting the balance of elements in a planet. The alternative is for some other culture to be deliberately broadcasting signals knowing that they would have to do this for tens of thousands of years and largely to never expect a reply, at all, let alone within any form of lifetime. The stronger these signals the better as the more power the more detectable range and therefore the more potential cultures could be looking.

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