Hacker News Reader

Comment by h2odragon | Hacker News Reader

Let me try to express that better: When we were just figuring out FM radio ourselves, i don't think we'd have been capable of recognizing a modern spread spectrum WiFi transmission as a signal. It would have been an elevated noise level and puzzling, perhaps.

So the next hundred years of human advance, I expect, will bring similarly transformative changes in the ways we communicate and the shape of our "technosignature".

Our expectations for what other species might be doing don't seem to be informed by the things we know we've done.

View on HN

Related to this.

We are basing what we consider natural phenomena on our observations of the galaxy.

If we were to flip the assumption from life being rare to life being pervasive, what assumed natural phenomena could in fact be evidence of life?

There is precedent for this on Earth. We are just startign to discover how much The Amazon rainforest is actually a human creation and basically a massive multi-generational bioengineering project.

This is not a serious position fo mine, btw, I know that we can track most astronomical phenomena back to fundamental laws of nature.

But equally there are some massive astronomical myseteries (dark matter/energy, certain stars being more/less common than expected etc) and I can't quite dismiss the wonder that our baseline assumptions have been tainted by this assumption.

Imagine if all the dark matter is repurposed for mega-civilization habitation and energy needs, and the matter we see is poorly suitable rejects

There's your Fermi paradox, we live in a dumpster pile.

Or Galaxies are the ultimate mega structure and dark matter is merely the observable signature of the gravity modification tech they use to hold them together.

I like this interpretation of the Fermi paradox the most: We're a dumpster-dwelling species barely qualifying as sentient compared to the species whose dump we inhabit.

Lines up great with my self-esteem.

Or in next 100 years we might figure out how to use neutrinos for communication and find out that galaxy is actually quite busy place, it's just nobody uses electromagnetic waves for comms same way they don't use smoke signals.

I can't find an official source, but the graph in this page look interesting https://nutsaboutnets.com/wifisurveyor/

It looks like using only old technology we can detect the signal and identify it as a artificial signal, but it would be very hard / impossible to decode.

You can listen to all the radio frequencies at once, from low AM ones up to dozens of GHz using inexpensive radio components - it's how bug hunters you see in movies work, they just measure electromagnetic waves, regardless of their wave length.

Granted, you'll not be able to differentiate between them, only that they exists. And at this point of searching for those signatures that's all you need though. Also Marconi was listening to lightning strikes generating radio waves using his radio, and that was over a century ago. Lightning strike generates radio waves all over the spectrum, so we had this capability right from beginning.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com