Posted on 04/28/2017 11:11:16 PM PDT by LibWhacker
Illustrates how the introduction of a planet can complicate ordinary gravitational lensing.
Voyager is traveling at eleven miles per second. How long would t take to get there.
13,000LY may as well be 13 billion Ly away given our current technology
So far away has to be cold as, well cold.
Voyager was of course not designed to travel to other stars. But, given time, it could. In this case a mere 220 million years. It’s battery is already dying, however.
(13000 x 6000000000000) / (11 x 3600 x 24 x 365) = 225 million years. But no one is talking about going there yet, thank goodness!
It is strange that with all the possible planets that could support intelligent life, that not one has been found that has generated that type of electromagnetic transmission we call radio.
Life-bearing planets may be exceedingly rare and we just haven’t seen one yet. Thus, no radio signals. Also, radio signals used for terrestrial communication aren’t powerful enough to be easily detected that far out in interstellar space.
And another 250 million years for a to get back here.
We keep looking in the radiation bands for communication methods. Because the speed of light is finite these don’t seem to be the most efficient for light year distance communications. A extra terrestrial species with the ability to communicate outside of their own space could be communicating in an entirely different manner. Maybe they’ve untangled the nature of ‘dark matter’ or have mastered interdimensional access.
My point is that the galaxy could be densely populated and we wouldn’t know it because we’re only considering that life will communicate on the EM radiation band. But the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it’s much more strange than we have the capacity to imagine.
Mamma always said, with microlensing, you never know what youre going to come up with.
Several factors work against detecting extraterrestrial radio transmissions.
One is it requires a tool-building species. There may be many alien species with high intelligence on other planets, but if they're not tool-builders, we'll never detect them. Think of a species like whales. Apparently quite intelligent. They even have music. But with those little flippers they have it makes it difficult to build anything.
Another factor is radio transmissions simply are not powerful enough and they get scattered and absorbed over interstellar distances.
The third factor is the narrow time-band where a civilization may actually use radio transmission. On Earth, we've been using radio transmission for about a century, a tiny fraction of time on a cosmic scale. Other alien races may have ascended, declined, and extinguished themselves millions of years before.
It is rather cool to speculate on however small the chance, of picking up the alien equivalent of "I Love Lucy" from some alien world.
Yep, it’s like looking for smoke signals... Ain’t gonna find any.
Cool graphic. And this is just our own galaxy. One among 100 billion!
I wish there was a planet that would accept liberals, like Soros, Al Gore, Michael Moore and Leonardo DiCaprio. But then, if they do have INTELLIGENT LIFE, they would be CONSERVATIVE!!!
Only 13000 light years away. They write like it’s doable.
You forgot to factor in leap years. Shaves a whole lot of time off that trip!
If that little spot is us, who took that photo????
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