ChatterBank4 mins ago
Are we transmitting?
I've been waiting for this category to turn up!
I've got the SETI@home screensaver on this PC which, as you probably know, scans through background noise looking for alien transmissions. Also, things like the movie 'Contact' seem to suggest that intelligent life would transmit on a unique frequency such as "hydrogen times pi" so we would see it for the message it is.
All well and good, but are WE routinely transmitting signals for them to pick up or are we the universal equivalent of a voyeur, sitting back letting someone else do all the work?
Answers
No best answer has yet been selected by Ralph. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here.
For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.No doubt if another intelligence were to invent TV, radar, satellites and mobile phones they would face similar engineering problems to us and would probably end up using the same frequencies for these purposes. There is no economic or survival advantage in deliberately informing galactic civilisations of our vulnerability (Species 2, Von Neumann's paranoid galaxy theory), but leakage of our signals may be detectable if they are louder than the background noise from space.
well i pretty much agree with all the answers, but one line in the question is quite stupid really. i think you have been watching too many movies ralph! lol i dont know where you got "hydrogen times pi" from, but hydrogen is a chemical and pi is an infinite number. you cant times hydrogen by pi! lol its like saying "what is the square route of a chair?"! lol
and you certainly wouldnt get a frequency if there was some way you could times it by pi.