RE: Re: starship-design: It's a bad, bad world out there

[David Levine <david@actionworld.com>]

Is this necessarily true?

Ref.:
http://www.landfield.com/faqs/astronomy/faq/part6/section-13.html
How far away could we detect radio transmissions?

The idea behind this part of the sci.astronomy FAQ is that detection of
normal radio and television signals at interstellar distances is a myth.
Math is included.  One summary quote:
"Even a 3000 meter diameter Radio Telescope could not detect the 'I Love
Lucy' TV show (re-runs) at a distance of 0.01 Light-Years!"

Narrowband radar is apparently much easier to detect, but will be short
in duration and non-repeating.

I don't know how easy to detect the EM leakage of a power-grid would be,
but it doesn't sound likely.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
David Levine                                david@actionworld.com
Director of Development               http://www.actionworld.com/
ActionWorld, Inc.                                  (212) 387-8200
"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once."

> ----------
> From: 	KellySt@aol.com[SMTP:KellySt@aol.com]
> Reply To: 	KellySt@aol.com
> Sent: 	Monday, October 27, 1997 9:20 PM
> To: 	stk@sunherald.infi.net; starship-design@lists.uoregon.edu
> Subject: 	Re:  Re: starship-design: It's a bad, bad world out
> there
> 
> 
> 
> >Unproven. There may be no MID-level civilizations here. Tribal
> >civilizations have no radio noise. Mid-civs  like us emit everything.
> >High-tech civs might not use radio for much communication. And if
> they
> >weren't aiming at us, we might not hear them anyways. Besides, do you
> >really think if they'd been detected we'd hear about it? Probably
> not.
> 
> If they had anything like our power grid we could easily detect them,
> and
> given most of the detectors are non-clasified (and keeping anything
> interesting classified is virtually imposible), if we found them we
> would all
> know.
> 
>