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Originally Posted by varmint
over interstellar distances, i'd like a means of communication that doesn't take twenty generations of waiting for someone to say hello back when you say hello.
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No one is trying to communicate. They are tying to find signs of life outside of our Earth. Nothing more. Sending a signal out is basically free, why not do it? They're also hoping (as humans tend to do) that they might find that sign of life nearby (within 20 or 30 light years). 10 would be even better, you almost could communicate at that distance.
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they are searching in a spectrum that any advanced civilization would find useless. might as well be looking for smoke signals from other worlds.
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Actually, they're searching in a spectrum that is well established all over the Universe. They're searching in a bandwidth that is (1) easy to make, (2) would be recognized by any civilization in the universe, since it's the frequency of the most common element in the universe, and (3) has shown to be effective in transmitting cleanly through all of the various debris that exists in the universe (other wavelengths get scattered away and are useless).
Finally, the massive parallel computing designs that they've worked on are being used in other fields of science, so even if you dismiss them as "kooks", they're contributing.