[Nolug] E-T sending messages

You are absolutely right. I was intellectually lazy, since there are
so many billions and billions of stars, and thus the likelyhood of life
being out there is a virtual certainty.

However, the distances are so great, and RF still only travels at a
fixed speed, and, compared to the vastness of space, there aren't that
many stars. Thus, any message round trip (send, interpret, decide
response, respond) would take many, many decades. Also, how do the
aliens decide which direction(s) around the sphere to send the codes?
Also again, even if you send RF messages to each 1/100th of second of
degree, after a few hundred billion miles, there will be large gaps
between each RF beam. ((This is presuming that the codes are sent
out in beams instead of broadcast, to ensure energy concentration.)
Then, since a light-year is 5.87 bn miles, and that beam may have to
go 10 or 20 (or much more!) light-years before reaching Sol's neighbor-
hood, the gaps between each (now *extremely* faint) beam are enormous.

Thus, IMHO, I don't think that even the wealthiest worlds would do such
a thing.

On Wed, 2002-12-18 at 17:53, bad-magic-number wrote:
> On the date of 12/18/2002 12:08:25 PM , Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.
> net> spoke:
> >Instead of searching cosmic static for non-existant aliens, the rc5-72
> >project from http://www.distributed.net uses the same concept (hence
> >the name) to use brute force to do mathematical-type things.
>
> That's a bit presumptuous... Live undeniably exists outside our Solar
> System based on mathematical probability... To say something only
> happened in one place in a universe this size would be pure folly.
>
> And it may very well be intelligent, but:
>
> 1. We might not find it since we can only see a sliver of the sky at
> Arecibo... 2. We may not know what to look for since the maybe very
> well be more advanced than us. We are cosmic infants as Homo Sapiens
> are a young species.
>
> And of course life outside our Solar System might very well not be as
> intelligent as us...
>
> Its a big universe and ludicrous to think we are singular and "special"
> in a cosmic sense.....

-- 
+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Ron Johnson, Jr.        mailto:ron.l.johnson@cox.net          |
| Jefferson, LA  USA      http://members.cox.net/ron.l.johnson  |
|                                                               |
| "My advice to you is to get married: If you find a good wife, |
| you will be happy; if not, you will become a philosopher."    |
|    Socrates                                                   |
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