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Astronomer: If Earth Is Average, We Should Find Alien Life Within 60 Light-Years
(www.sciencealert.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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Futurology
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Sometimes I wonder if the reason we've not found any life might be because we just don't recognise it as such. It might be too alien; maybe it's such a large system that we don't fully comprehend it, or perhaps it moves at a timescale that we just cannot grasp.
We created gods in our image to explain existence. Anthropocentric as we are, we assumed that humanity was somehow special, distinguished from all other life on Earth. Now we're doing the same with the very definition of life. Life looks a certain way on Earth, so obviously it needs to look the same everywhere.
It makes sense as an outset though, you can only look for what we know to look for.
We're looking for high power radio signals leaking into space. With a structure that we recognize. Basically analog screams into the void.
But we're generating fewer and fewer of those, because it's more efficient to spread data across frequencies at low power. As we compress data and encrypt it, the signal begins to look more and more like random noise.
There were a few decades where our civilization was screaming into the void, but those are coming to an end. Because efficiency beats screaming into the void.
We're probably average. If alien technology follows a similar trajectory to our own, there will only be a brief window where it will be sloppy enough for us to detect.
What about, rather than communicating with electromagnetic waves, they communicate with gravitational waves? Or something else? There's a lot of dark matter out there, what if it's alien telecoms?
🤷 We're looking for radio signals. It seems unlikely we'd detect those.