Everything you’ve said and more has been said for generations. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/articl...ple-have-always-complained-about-young-adults
A billion light years away puts it about 400 times further away than the Andromeda galaxy. Radio signals from an intelligent civilization that far away would be undetectable - if we were even looking in the right frequency range - and if they even use the RF signals. I would posit that we would have face to face contact with said civilization before we detected their signals, since if they didn't destroy themselves, they would be at least a billion years more advanced than we are. And with a billion years of progress, I am sure they would have found a way to bend the laws of physics for interstellar travel. Of course, a billion light years away, they would have many many more closer worlds and galaxies to explore before picking some random planet in a random galaxy, that is a billion years behind them in tech.
I remember Eliza from the 70s. I was at U of Fla and they had it running as an "app" under TSO on an IBM 370. Pretty damned impressive at the time. As long as you stayed on the rails, you could have some interesting conversations. It would probably appear to the public as AI today. However, that term is very loosely (and incorrectly) used. As clever as Eliza was, it wasn't AI.
I was exaggerating to make the point. The odds of two civilizations transmitting and receiving the correct frequency and mode at the correct time for one to hear the other, given the random variable of how many years away they are in distance, and the randomness of how each progresses technically, make it very very unlikely that they would ever detect one another. Consider that during the brief time we've communicated using RF waves, we have already used broadband spark gap, AM, AM-USB or AM-LSB, FM, PSK, and a variety of digital modes, plus we've used spread-spectrum frequency hopping. Who knows what's next? If there is another transmitting civilization out there somewhere, chances are their transmissions sailed past us a few hundred years ago and now they're onto something else we haven't thought of yet. The odds of intelligent life existing elsewhere are about 50:50 depending upon whose science you trust (see https://news.columbia.edu/life-intelligence-universe-earth-bayesian-statistics ). The odds of having the correct overlap in time to make one detectable by another are awfully slim.
More likely, a few million or billion years ago or in the future... That your example was "a few hundred years" reveals our inherent limited vision as a species. I'm a geologist, so I think in millions regularly (just not in relationship to my bank account). If they are out there and know about us, they are smart enough to keep their distance.
Not to mention the fact that for isotropic emissions you have the inverse square law to deal with. Even if those signals passed by us in the insanely short time span (relative to the time span in which intelligent life feasibly could have evolved) we’ve had technology to theoretically receive them, were they strong enough for us to detect?
If they knew where the wanted the transmission to go, they could avoid some of the inverse square problem by encoding the info in a laser or maser (microwave frequency) beam. They both still spread, though not as much. Heck, if their targeting information is a little out of date, right now they could be beaming detailed instructions for building a warp drive into rubble at the bottom of a valley in Aricibo.
I’m not sure how they would ever know where to aim a non-isotropic radiator given that any signal we could’ve produced either hadn’t existed at the time they send a signal or won’t reach them for hundreds/thousands/millions of years after we produced it, but yes if they somehow did it’s much less of a factor. RF is hardly my forte. How wide is the tightest beam transmission and what is the attenuation on the scale of thousands to millions of light years? Is there any real effective difference or is this a 10^-17 vs 10^-20 sort of deal?
All valid points. I posted mostly because I'm still mourning the loss of the Aricibo radio telescope.
Yeah that was a real shame. Iconic device that produced some amazing work. Really makes you wonder what we could achieve if we spent a little less time killing each other and a little more time collaborating. Call me an idealist.
Here's an unusual application of ChatGPT: Joshua Browder, the CEO of the New York-based startup DoNotPay, created a way for people contesting traffic tickets to use arguments in court generated by artificial intelligence. Here's how it was supposed to work: The person challenging a speeding ticket would wear smart glasses that both record court proceedings and dictate responses into the defendant's ear from a small speaker. The system relied on a few leading AI text generators, including ChatGPT and DaVinci. The first-ever AI-powered legal defense was set to take place in California on Feb. 22, but not anymore. As word got out, an uneasy buzz began to swirl among various state bar officials, according to Browder. He says angry letters began to pour in. https://www.npr.org/2023/01/25/1151...-to-argue-in-court-then-came-the-jail-threats This lawyer discusses not only the potential legal issues, but also the practical issues:
