OK Class... for your final question. If the radio signal left alpha centaurs 150,000 years ago and a Laser signal went out fifty years later... how many lightyears till the Laser passes the Radio signal???
Show your work.
Extra Points if you answer the question without a calculator
"We must remember that ET could be quite imaginative."
Am I the only one who finds this statement hillarious? Physicists today seem clueless about history. They thought they knew everything there is to know a hundred years ago and they still think so.
Interesting. Lemme know if you see anything else on this.
"But I am not really willing to accept your premise, because it may well be that the means of communications they have are of a kind that we do not know how to receive, and that they would not have the means of communicating with sufficiently powerful radio or optical signals. That is something which, technologically, is too difficult for them but they would have some other means we would not recognize." -- Thomas J. Gold (Communication with Extraterrestial Intelligence)
I would imagine aliens would seek communication methods that would travel faster than light, but what would it be...
If I'm not mistaken, that is the same Paul Horowitz who is the co-author of The Art of Electronics, which is one of the best textbooks ever written for learning electronics theory as well as hands-on electronics. Add the ARRL Radio Amateur's Handbook and you have an unbeatable one-two punch in the electronics books department.
Whether either book will lead to successful communication with aliens is less certain, though...
Exactly what I was going to say.