Don't you know anything? They all travel millions of miles to get here and then promptly crash. I know because I read it in the Enquirer.

I think your diminishing radio signal really only applies when said radio signal is in an atmosphere. In a vacum, there is no friction, allowing the radio wave to continue to propegate at the same wavelength and frequency. But solar wind and gravity may effect it a bit...

That said, anyone see the flick, "Contact" with Jodie Foster? Definately a "makes you think" movie...

-Z

Excellent movie. Based on Carl Sagan's book.

I did some reading, found this question addressed on a physics forum. Radio waves in free space do indeed obey the inverse square law, the strength of the signal diminishes with the square of the distance from the origin. It is not a question of the wave being impeded by atmosphere. It is because the signal when emitted has a certain finite amount of energy. As it propagates outward, that energy is spread out over the surface of a sphere, which is 4 x pi x r^2. When the radius of the sphere is 1 light year (6 trillion miles), that original finite amount of energy is spread over an area 4 x pi x (6 x 10^12)^2 square miles.

Everybody thinks that the little greys don't exist...they are here....

Ronald Reagan was right about a threat from up there... we have been a odds with them for decades now. luckily we have reverse engineered enough of their technology since Roswell that we could hold our own in a knock down drag out confrontation. Those cattle mutilations and abuduction stories aren't foolin around stuff, that goes on for reals...best we can tell is that the cattle inards provides the protein that they need to survive, they take it is a liquid form...and the aduductions are 2 fold to trace the subjects of their studies and to do gentic hybridization of an alein race and our own, best bet is that they are planning on colonizing another planet with a sturdy race of beings.

We have found that radar waves effect their electomagnetic drives which causes them to lose stability and become vunerable to our antiaircraft missles...that was the old way. Today we can use laser weapons on satelites to accomplish the same results.

Whoa! Have you been hanging out with my out-of-work friend, 'cause he's been saying the same as you.

About the antiaircraft missiles - my friend says there are unrecognized reports that more than once, alien ships have taken them out, no problema, easy-pleasey - even before the missiles have been launched.

I do.

Radio waves:

They travel at the speed of light,
until you can't hear them anymore.

Then they travel at the speed of dark.
But then it doesn't matter.

I forget the formula.

So Johnny Mathis is out there, somewhere, crooning, "Chances Are."

Shuddering...:eek:

Oh yeah! Much more than once!

My neighbor said, "I don't believe in U.F.O.s"
I said, "Because they've all been identified?
He said, "No."
I said, "Okay."
Now he won't talk to me.

Did yer friend tell you about the truning on the launch cycle of the ICBM's in North Dakota? Yep they bin there and done that too.

The thing that happened at Roswell is that the Lightening storm effected their ships stability...once we realized thats what happened we could use our radar to effect the same thing. And if we were are quick enough whoops there goes another one.

I think it was Timothy Good, the British UFO researcher who discovered a government document that referred to them as AVC's. Can't remember if it was produced by our CIA, NSA, military... or the British Ministry of Defence. Anyway, it was designated as being the abbreviation for...

Alien Visitation Craft

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Check out one of his books sometime.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Good

Wooden shudders won't prevent their penetration when the Mathis waves get bounced back (oh, yeah! Listen to any Golden Oldies station!).

The shudders need to be made out of mu-metal.

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/qItugh-fFgg&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/qItugh-fFgg&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

Reminds me of the old Twilight Zone I saw many years ago. It was about a book titled "How To Serve Man". At the very end of the show, turns out it was a cookbook :)

Is that where The Simpsons got it from - that thing with the two aliens and "How to Cook Forty Humans" which later was revealed to be "How to Cook FOR Forty Humans" or whatever?

Wouldn't surprise me. All the great/original ideas in television writing came from the 1950s & 1960s anyway.

Space is expanding, but not all galaxies are moving farther apart.

In fact, the Andromeda Galaxy will collide with the Milky Way Galaxy in 4 B years or so. Andromeda is much bigger and will probably just absorb the most of the Milky Way. There's a fair chance our solar system will remain intact as we're far enough from the center of the MW Galaxy.

And no... as someone said, the speed of light does NOT change just because the Universe is expanding. It's C, it's a Constant. Does NOT change.

The elasticity of space has always annoyed me.

I personally think that if we actually knew the true nature of the universe that we would find that we were almost completely wrong about everything. Of course that's just my opinion.

you're completely wrong about everything, sniper. ;)

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1233254308.jpg

IIRC a space ship arrives, asks for volunteers to go back to their planet with them, after the ship leaves someone on earth finds they left that book behind.

I can't remember anything about the first time I was abducted.
Except that it happened at exactly 8:12:43 pm on a Sat. night.
They kept me for 4 hrs. in a time warp of some sort.
I know that because when they returned me it was exactly 8:12:43 pm.
On that same Sat. night!

Every abduction since, same thing, always on a Sat. night, same time.
I can't remember anything about any of them!
Nobody believes me. Even people I'm with when it happens!
Personally, I think they're probably evil (my abductors).

Thanks to you i just spent over an hour reading official military logs of sighting after sighting by US military personnel(up to and including a base commander in one case) of UFO's over/near our nuclear facilities.

http://www.nicap.org/babylon/missile_incidents.htm

Great, one more thing to worry about. Thanks Tabs.... :-/

Hehe, i'm sure i am. But i extend that to all of us. :-P

in today's interweb:

Attempts to Contact Aliens Date Back More Than 150 Years
Michael Schirber
Astrobiology Magazine

space.com – Thu Jan 29, 9:20 am ET The desire to contact intelligent life on other planets is much older than the UFO craze and the SETI movement. Several 19th century scientists contemplated how we might communicate with possible Martians and Venusians.

These early proposals - which predate by 150 years the first extraterrestrial message that was sent in 1974 - were based on visual signals, as the invention of radio was still decades away.

In fact, as history shows, ideas for interplanetary communication have largely been driven by whatever the current technology allowed - be it lamps, radios or lasers.

"You go with what you know," said Steven Dick, NASA Chief Historian.

Are we alone?

Over two thousand years ago, the ancient Greeks argued over the existence of life on other planets, but the idea really took off after the Copernican revolution.

"Once it was realized that all the planets go around the sun, it was not hard to imagine that the other planets could be like Earth," Dick said.

Galileo, Kepler and others considered the inhabitability of the planets, while being careful not to upset Church authority.

"The idea blossomed in the 17th century into the 'plurality of worlds' debate, but it remained controversial," said Dick, who has written several books on the topic.

One of the most influential proponents for extraterrestrial life was Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, who wrote Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds in 1686.

Despite the interest, there was no recorded discussion of how we might locate or contact these potential aliens until more than a century later.

Crop triangles and burning canals

Florence Raulin-Cerceau of the Alexandre Koyre Center in Paris has documented the early attempts at communication with extraterrestrial intelligence (CETI), or what is now often called active SETI.

"As early as the 19th century, inventors imagined "sky telegraph" equipment to communicate with the supposed inhabitants of the solar system's planets," Raulin-Cerceau recently wrote with her colleague in the French magazine Pour la Science.

The first of these inventors was Carl Friedrich Gauss, the German mathematician. In the 1820s, he spoke of reflecting sunlight towards the planets with his land surveying invention, the heliotrope. He is also credited with the idea of cutting a giant triangle in the Siberian forest and planting wheat inside.

"The size and color contrast should have made the object visible from the moon or Mars, and the geometric figure could only be interpreted as an intentional construction," Raulin-Cerceau wrote.

Twenty years later, the astronomer Joseph von Littrow came up with a similar idea to pour kerosene into a 30-kilometer-wide circular canal that would be lit at night to signal our presence.

Concentrated light

The second half of the 19th century saw more realistic proposals, according to Raulin-Cerceau.

In 1869, the French inventor and poet Charles Cros imagined using a parabolic mirror to focus the light from electric lamps towards Mars or Venus. He figured the light could be flashed on and off to encode a message.

"Cros granted that the planets could be inhabited by beings not able to respond, but he was still persuaded that 'the eternal isolation of the spheres [will be] vanquished,'" wrote Raulin-Cerceau.

A light-based "Morse code" was also considered by the British statistician Francis Galton in 1896. He took care not to assume that Martians would have our same base-10 counting system, as they probably wouldn't have 10 fingers.

Around the same time, A. Mercier, a member of the Astronomical Society of France, devised a plan to place several reflectors on the Eiffel Tower that could direct sunlight towards Mars. He also considered using the moon as a giant screen on which to project light beams.

Could aliens have seen any of these light displays?

"It depends on how much money you think the Martians are spending on their telescopes," said Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute.

Radio turns on

It is now generally assumed that radio is a more suitable means of extraterrestrial communication. Radio waves are less affected by cosmic dust than visible light, and there is less of a radio background to deal with in the sky.

Two of radio's pioneers showed interest in interplanetary radio communication. In 1901, Nikola Tesla reported receiving a strange signal, possibly from Mars, on his giant transmitting tower in Colorado Springs. Nineteen years later, Guglielmo Marconi told reporters about his detection of radio emissions that appeared to come from outer space.

However, the switch to radio-based SETI did not happen immediately.

As late as the 1920s, many people (including Albert Einstein) still considered visual-based communication more practical, since radio transmitters were not yet capable of focusing a beam on a distant planet.

What's more, scientists gradually became convinced that Mars did not have the right conditions to support life, so any presumed extraterrestrials likely lived much, much further away.

"It seemed hopeless to receive messages from other stellar systems, so people said 'Forget it.'" Shostak explained.

It wasn't until 1959 that radio-based SETI started to be taken seriously. In that year, Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison showed that radar transmitters of the time were already powerful enough to send signals many light years through space.

"If we can do it, then the aliens might be doing it," Shostak said.

In the year that followed, Frank Drake performed Project Ozma, the first radio sky survey to look for intelligent signals.

And then in 1974 - a century and half after Gauss - Drake transmitted the first actual SETI message using the Arecibo radio telescope. Scientists are still waiting for a response.

I miss read the title of this thread and spent all morning searching for my extra testicle.

Uh, oh...I haven't told anyone this, but...since you've brought it up...

The morning after my first abduction, I discovered my extra one was gone!

WTF! Do they keep on abducting me to see If I've grown another one? :eek:

I've been up close and personal twice, which I posted about before.

Laugh all you want, Sports Fans...denial isn't a metric.

Hey, I'm serious! :eek:
Post link to your posts, please. Mebbe they'll help jog my memory. :D

For anything to happen you have to get to light speed
What the USA is doing is equivalent to a slug crawling from LA to NYC and wanting funding for it.
In fact when it comes to space travel in this illustration the slug is FAST !!

did it involve probing, Paul? ;)

oh yeah, denial is a river in Egypt. :)

Missed that...got a link?

So, more reading (thanks, Jim) shows that one of the pioneers of the SETI concept calculated that a huge radio telescope, if turned into a huge focused radio transmitter, would be "just powerful enough" to send a signal to the nearest star.

Obviously, an ordinary FM or TV broadcast signal is going to be much weaker than the hypothetical huge transmitter, and it won't be focused either hence subject to the inverse square law. And there is no particular reason to think there is intelligent life on the "nearest star", that would be entirely too lucky.

So, I am now quite convinced that no alien civilization is watching "I Love Lucy". It seems pretty clear to me that if we want to be found, we will have to try very, very, very hard to be found. Otherwise we will live, love, and die alone. As a species, that is.

A few days later, Cocconi realized that the newly completed radio telescope at Jodrell Bank would be just powerful enough to transmit a detectable signal to the nearest star.

John, one can transmit a signal with some "features" that can be recovered at the distant receiver by processing the extremely weak signal (that's buried in the background noise) over a long period of time. So, even though the signal is not obvious to the "casual listener," long-term observations may actually be able to detect it.

Friction????


also used effect for affect - but that's nothing in comparison...

Yup - sometimes it pays to live in the 'burbs...

- our "tools" aren't exactly expanding...

besides, we measure red shifts to determine this - you don't really hold a set of calipers up to a galaxy...

"tersesial" is how unintelligent life posts about intelligent life....

I accept that. But again, you have to really try to do that. That's what I meant, we won't be found unless we are really trying to be found.

and someone is really trying to hear us.

And they are hungry . . .

. . . for company . . .