Support NeoGAF

[bonesmccoy]

I think it'll be more like 5000 years.

Nah, 500000 years.

Nah, 50000000 years.

 

[Mr. Giggles]

This reminds me of that one futurama episode, the one where fry knocks a TV station of the air and a thousand years later the aliens notice the mess

 

[Duane Cunningham]

Required reading: http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html

 

[Saucy_XL]

Yeah, the article doesn't really make much sense. If aliens were out there broadcasting their own I love Zorg TV show, we would need to build a receiver like the size of a planet to receive and decode it.

Plus the period in which a civilization "radiates" signals like that outwards is fairly short, already in a hundred years we have moved from broadcast TV to mostly cable/satellite TV and will be moving to pretty much all tightband data transmissions within this century. So the window in which data can even be captured is fairly small.

Finally the Von Neumann uncontrolled replication issue - we are pretty close to launching tiny, tiny robots that can sail to hundreds of stars and beam back scientific data (Russian Billionaire and Stephen Hawking started an initiative to do just this a few months ago). Its probably 50-200 years from that to launch drones that can reach a target environment, deconstruct some asteroids and make a million copies, and launch those million copies into another thousand stars.

Any civilization that does this would have littered the entire galaxy within a million years. So... why isn't there the equivalent of space drone garbage all over our solar system? It could be uniquely human to want to explore the entire galaxy, of course.

Yea article struck me as being pretty useless. The 'paper' is from an undergrad, it's just a bachelor's paper with a teacher's co-authorship added on. Not docking the student, but I don't get how on Earth this made it onto the Mirror and Telegraph.

This article from the OP also barely makes sense as you've shown.


Edit: Maybe it's just me or I have to much free time today but why is this making the rounds? It's now on Fox and CNN's website as of an hour ago. How did this undergrad paper, which says nothing new, make national news, and now it's being copied by literally every major online news source? Genuinely curious what gave this random article traction.