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If every star in the night sky is a signal is it possible to send data to other galaxies by intermittently blocking out the suns light in that direction? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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[–] [S] 3 points 4 months ago* (8 children)

First part, wouldnt that only depend on the amount of light that you need to block for them to detect and couldn't you place the shutter further away to reduce its size?

Also, name a faster way to transmit data intergalaxtically

Edit: also, since we are already transmitting light couldn't we just send images. If life such as us is who we want to reach wouldnt it only make sense to design for our own light receptors?

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago

    Nothing would beat light as far as transmission goes. Also, the further the shutter the further that doesn't matter. As the galaxy expands you might block light for something that'll have moved away and miss the signal, so it's a pretty big risk to try and position this shutter strategically enough to make that work.

    However, a fun thing to think about is, after you make your signal thing to broadcast, by the time that message reaches other galaxies, 33k years is long enough that other life might very well have come into existence and evolved.

    Even crazier to think someone out there may have already broadcast their own message and we don't have the means or technology to receive it or notice because they are so many others out there, OR it just hasn't reached us yet. Maybe in another could thousand years.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Sure you can put it farther away, but the sun is massive, it would still need to be pretty big I would guess, but I'm not an astronomer so I don't know the numbers.

    As far as I know we don't know of any faster way to send signals. That doesn't make sending the signals impossible, just very impractical.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 4 months ago* (2 children)

    How about this, we point it at blackholes hoping they act as a worm hole and then are transmitted to people a million years in the past and we instruct them to write the data down on stone tablets so when they advance due to also giving them advance technology they remember to send a note back.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Sure we can do that, but then we can also just think hard about it and hope anyone hears it, not much of a difference

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  • [–] [S] 0 points 4 months ago

    Thats all just math's. We could create a theoretical model and send enough data where we maximize the probability. All be, the probability would still be starkly low but still an interesting thought experiment.

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  • [–] -2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    While radio telescopes are arguably slower then the speed of light, being able to encode and compress data into a radiowave is a faster way to communicate.

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