The Aliens Are Coming

[Julian Christou]

Well speaking as an alien, at least one here in the US anyway (I'm not
foreign I'm British) I've been following the discussion going on here
about the radio signals and so on. Well, just remember it's been 50 years
since the first regularlyb'cast TV signals were sent out and even longer
for radio signals. Now as these travle at the speed of light, then the
extra-solar planets already discovered have probably been bathed in EM
radiation form our blue-green home. However, actually dtecting them is
a lot more of a difficult problem basically because these are not beamed
signals - you can imagining them radiating outward isotropically, i.e.
in all direrctions so that the signal strebgth has to fall off by the
inverse square of the distance. So another civilisation out there
woul have to be looking out ofr these signals with extremely high gain
systems. Not being a radio astronomer/engineer I'm not sure how high
gain but fairly substantail especially as radio signature of our Sun
could well cause interference. And then, there's the problem of if they
are deteceted would that civilisation have the ability to follow them back to
their source? If so, then they couldn't travel faster than light speed
(this is science here not Star Trek) so assuming they were 50 ly years
distant and left today we wouldn't see them for probably 100 years taking
into account acceleration and deceleration time at the earliest. And who know's
where we (the human race) will be then!!

nd as for Jill's scenario about the short wave reflection of the atmosphere
>
Now surely here's a chance for a live Hawkwind gig.
>
That sounds kinda familiar to some Butterworth/Moorcock stories ... :-)

Julian
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| Dr. Julian Christou          | Phone:  505-846-4712 x330   |
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