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Q&A

Would advanced extraterrestrial life really use radio signals as the way to communicate over interstellar distances?

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When we think to interstellar communications, we immediately think to radio signals with medium or large antennas :

  • We all know about radio signals in seti.
  • In the case of fictional stories, some peoples will even rememberer the broken antenna of Obi"‘Wan in Star Wars episode 2 where he finally manage to contact coruscant half of the galaxy away (through radio signals).

However, we know the drawbacks :

  • the farther the target is, the more the required energy is. This start to heart our space exploration : for example, we disable many instruments on voyager probes only for few extra energy saving whereas the antenna consume more than all combined instruments.
  • transfer speeds happen at speed of light : this may sound fast but at the galaxy level, things can take centuries in order to travel. Everyone know the case of the philæ probe that landed at 90° angle because as it happened in automatic mode, gyroscopic stabilizers being stopped on the first touch (not to mention the rosetta relay requirement that prevented the primary mission objective to complete).

So at some point, the use of radio signals become a strong STOP (definitely aborting the idea to send data between galaxies and well shorter before that).

In the same time, there are reports of communication using quantum nonlocality over short distances (this might only solve the energy problem, speed being only one among others).
Of course I read about the theoretical possibility of quantum nonlocality in use in communications before asking this question : that's why I think surveys like this one are hoax.

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This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/34929. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

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