Are we the noisiest planet in the neighborhood or what?!
This could make you rethink your estimate of proportion. Apparently, (at this time) we’ve been transmitting our whereabouts to every alien within one hundred light years…
I read this short article on something fairly interesting (HERE)…apparently our earthly radio transmissions are are now reaching places very very very very far away.
A thought crossed my mind about this. Any society as advanced as us or more so will almost certainly either be receptive to radio waves…but here’s the problem: Exactly how receptive?
I would like to point out that while we can attribute radiation for a significant amount of our evolution, we can also attribute the scarcity of life outside our planet to it…it is the double edged sword that makes earth so rare. There isn’t just life here…theres a TON of it.
SO now that we know that the number of planets capable of supporting life is waaaaaaaay higher than we guessed1, we really need to entertain the idea that we’re not alone, because to ignore every possible indicator that it’s true would really put us in a scary and indefensible position.
We assume also that other intelligent species wouldn’t sweat us blasting everything within 100 light years with lots and lots of noise. I mean, in our quest to make sure we’re not alone…what are we prepared for when they finally do show up and surprisingly expect our society to be a derivative of the Lucile Ball Show2
The bigger problem is the assumption that the signal would actually be received as a communication…what if it is considered noise…or worse…interference? My point is that we are making a whoooole lot of assumptions and firing off a whole lot of EMR into space under the premise of scientific space exploration that we wouldn’t dare point at ourselves because it would fry us faster than a man-sized microwave oven.
On the big scheme of things, we’re like galactic infants, all we want to do eat, shit, and scream our guts out. We can’t see very well, we barely know what to make of everything we do know, we’re only marginally communicative on a mathematical scale, and all we know to do is grow, eat more, shit more, and scream more. I think we give ourselves far too much credit, and the one thing we can expect is for who-or-what-ever we encounter will very likely have an agenda similar to that of a scolding, fed-up, and irritable parent….because we’ve been flooding the neighborhood with nothing but the crap from the entertainment industry for decades.
The only species we’re likely to encounter right now will either be far more advanced at least technologically3 or would be equipped for a one way trip to settle here, thus immediately causing 7 billion humans to go into fight or flight mode thanks to Hollywood giving us all the wrong information we could ever want in order to prepare. Do you see a happy ending here? I don’t.
On the cosmic scale, we now know very clearly that we’re incredibly lucky to be alive at all, that we’re constantly surrounded by deadly factors completely outside our scope of control, and that we’re facing the limits of our own sustainability through very rose tinted glasses.
…and yet here we go…inviting yet another factor that our own observations and indicators of self-preservation should be screaming at us not to do.
I just can’t help but think…if the Milky Way was our neighborhood, the earth would be that house in the neighborhood that everyone hates for being loud, noisy, messy, and completely oblivious to the people around us that might not be so cool about the noise pollution.
I am sooooo not saying we should all be prepared for the next alien invasion. I am just saying that maybe, just maaaaaybe…pointing all those radio transmitters out there to communicate who, what, where, and when we are might easily be construed as that godawful neighbor that feels the need to run a speaker out onto his front porch and share his taste in music with everyone on the block.
Okay…rant over…have a great night.
-T
