love the link!

I have triplet sisters who are friends who have the telepathic
think going on -- the 2 who are identical, that is. . the3rd sister,
whom I dated, was envious as hell. -- j
.

Yes. The most common antenna is known as a Yagi - just think of the old Christmas Tree antennas people used to use for TV. It consists of multiple wires (usually one transmitting, one or two reflecting, and up to a dozen focusing) all parallel to each other and perpendicular to the direction of transmission. It's not unusual in a Yagi tuned for a specific frequency to see 20 db of gain and amateur radio experimenters have seen 100 db gains and more. They are common when trying to contact the International Space Station or when doing moon-bounce communications. Even a very basic 3-element Yagi is used for HF communications and commonly improves gain by 15 db or more. And just FYI, but for the uninitiated, the db scale starts at -170 dB. Spread spectrum typically operates at between-130 dB and -150 dB, relying on the frequency-hopping algorithm to sort noise from signal as opposed to the standard communications which rely on a noticeable difference between ambient noise and signal.

Wow! Just what I wanted...how did you ever know???

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/world...

Jan, future is here

yes, Jan;;; I understand. . the pepperoni pizza will be delivered
to your door in half an hour, with the cheese sauce and Sprite,
as you ordered telepathically. == grandsonJohn's delivery
.

this is good -- when do we leave??? -- j
.

NASA is experimenting with White's permutation of the Alcubierre equation. We might be near effective FTL.

Jan

robgambril -

My first answer to the Fermi Paradox is the 'bongo drum' metaphor I explained above.

I doubt that alien civilizations have the Star Trek Prime Directive of non-interference (which never made sense to me, other than as a plot device). They may have policies against initiating contact with any civilization below a certain threshold. We don't know what that threshold might be, but if we flew up to their planet and knocked on their door, I suspect we would have made the grade.

Jan, liked the cat emo

Part of the problem is that people imagine that any hypothetical aliens have an identical biology, including a biological clock and relative scale to ours... Imagine an alien species, highly intelligent,, from a very fast period planet where one of their days equals perhaps 9 of our seconds, the species consider themselves large at the size of gnats, and wonder why no one has contacted them via visible spectra lasers in the high UV band (which, to them, is visible light) or gravitationally altered proton waves (which they have been using for their communications for, well, millennia now)...

Now reverse that. what if WE are the "gnat aliens" to every other species in the multiverses?

Maybe the reason we don't hear them is because they aren't transmitting in cycles per second, but cycles per century.

And that doesn't even come close to the phenomenon that we, as a sapient species, have been around for how many dozen thousand years - out of 13 billion? What if - the "interstellar age" has already come - and gone - before there was anything more than greyish-bluish-greenish mucas-ey lichen on our swelteringly steamy proto-planet, and we are truly extreme latecomers - too late to even be latecomers - perhaps the last of intelligent life.

After all, it wasn't that very long ago on OUR scale that we thought the universe revolved around our big blue marble...

I liked that post too.

Jan

My metaphor for SETI is 'a bunch of natives, paddling a canoe around coastlines, listening for bongo drums to determine if there is anyone there'. Space could be full of signals that we do not recognize as such because we are still transmitting - and looking for - the sound of 'bongo drums'.

We have been transmitting radio signals for about a century; I suspect that before another century is done we will have different methods of transmission and even we will not be transmitting bongo drum signals any more.

We don't know what an interstellar society uses for communication, because we are not there yet.

Jan

"European explorers - well, yeah there's the rub. Just as Hawking warns."
Maybe it would be something like this in 500 years: https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...

I think extraterrestrials would view humans as too messed up in the heads to bother with.

There are a number of theoretical alternatives to electromagnetic radiation for communications purposes; modulated neutrino beams, gravitational radiation, quantum entanglement, plus all those that we have not considered. We have been aware of radio for a bit over 100 years, a blink of the cosmic eye as time goes, and we are already exploring alternatives.
Freeman Dyson suggested that mega-structures could be a detectable characteristic of a class 2 Kardashev civilization. Maybe that is what we are seeing or maybe it is something very different. But what ever it is it's bound to be interesting.

Sped up - yes. Perfect "virtual reality" - of course. All thats required is the Hardware-Wetware bridge - very soon to come.

European explorers - well, yeah there's the rub. Just as Hawking warns.

I didn't think of that. I wonder if the traveler would perceive people talking through the quantum ansible as drastically sped up. Maybe they would plug their brains into a computer that would allow them to experience it in virtual reality. although they couldn't participate if it's all racing by.

This line of thinking makes it actually seem more likely ships could turn up in orbit like European explorers.

Of course for that person the trip might be only a few years, relativistic time-dilation and all.
And with real-time tele-presence (using entangled-particle technologies) you never even have to say good bye.

Exploration is in our genes. Really.
We'll go.

Wonder if they have a 'solution' to GW ;^)

Yeah, I was a little surprised that nobody seems to have heard of it yet.

Sure, it'll probably be disproved but that never stopped them before!
Now if it was about eating ice cream as diet food, or how breathing causes cancer....

I agree. Even if we are 'noticed', what makes us more interesting than the millions of planets that are a lot closer to them?

"but could be the biggest news in human history."
Therefore, regardless of the facts, it will be reported as ... nothing.

Consider this, what if "solidity" isn't a criteria for life at all? What if a loose collection of particles in a misty environment (Jupiter-like, Saturn-like), completely indistinguishable from its surroundings, can be alive and sentient? What if those particles reside on the surface or interior of a sun? What if they are floating around like a cloud in space? What if each of those use light flashes to communicate - much like we see lightning.

While I think humanoid is the likely life-form we'll eventually encounter, the idea that we could have already observed life and written off as "nature" is a bit humbling.

Yes, that's exactly right. Most antennas are at least somewhat directed. You may see an antenna on a Wi-Fi router labelled 3dBi gain, which means out the sides you get twice the power (twice = 3dB) you would get compared to a theoretical isotropic that sends signals out equally in all directions. A small dish can easily have 20dB gain.

Link budget arithmetic ends up being surprising simple. Power out + TX antenna gain - loss in the cable going to the antenna - FSPL - attenuation due to objects in the way + RX antenna gain - loss in that cable = the signal the receiver sees. The minimum signal required is the receiver's sensitivity. A typical Wi-Fi card needs -75dBm to connect, and -50dBm to get high rates. A GPS goes down to -130dBm, but it sends much less data per second.

I think it's so cool that inexpensive receivers can pull 1Mbps of information from -90dBm (one trillionth of a watt) of signal.

Look forward to it.

If TOR ever accepts or regects my last Novella I'll post a link to it here; I think you'd enjoy its premise. It's less philosophical and less technologically in depth than my first two books, but it touches on some serious possibilities that I personally find intriguing.

Aren't Voyager's signals "directed" rather than transmitted "spherically"?
That makes it travel much farther - but also makes it much harder to intercept.

I'm winging this - way off base?