What’s your sense about SETI or the Fermi paradox, if a signal becomes so vastly diluted just within our solar system?
I’m sure the SETI people have thought about this and made various calculations, but with the inverse square law and the vastness of space, maybe “needle in a haystack” is optimistic.
Is it the wrong model to think that anything but maybe a galaxy scale civilization is just going to have it’s signals more or less totally dissolved into seemingly random cosmic fluctuations, relative to our sensors/receivers at least?
Maybe. Recovering data on interstellar distances is hard.
Integrating a long time to see if there's a signal there above background levels is maybe not so hard (especially if it was intended for detection in this scenario).
The big issue for data recovery is energy per symbol. If you can integrate for hours, that can still be a lot of "special photons" (whether they're on a weird radio frequency or light wavelength).
What’s your sense about SETI or the Fermi paradox, if a signal becomes so vastly diluted just within our solar system?
I’m sure the SETI people have thought about this and made various calculations, but with the inverse square law and the vastness of space, maybe “needle in a haystack” is optimistic.
Is it the wrong model to think that anything but maybe a galaxy scale civilization is just going to have it’s signals more or less totally dissolved into seemingly random cosmic fluctuations, relative to our sensors/receivers at least?