this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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There is no such thing as a Stupid Question!
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Man... Check this shit out...
So like everybody is saying, light and radio are just a tiny little segment of the EM spectrum... And yeah, there's stuff in the universe that emits all sorts of wavelengths, sure, but consider the visible portion. Gigantic stars, some that make our sun look tiny, are up there spewing out massive amounts of light, just like our sun does, yeah? And what we get here is just a little spot in the sky (don't get me wrong though, that's a long ass way for that light to project...). So the whole ass spectrum is gonna be that way, ya know? Like we get radio, x ray, microwave, uhf, VHF, and a bajillion other types of EM radiation from space, in little tiny points of a miniscule little signal...
Here on earth, we're generating massive amounts of this stuff. Cell phones, Bluetooth, the little electronic eye that opens the door at Walmart, we could sit here collective and toss out EM sources all day long and not cover everything we've built that's spitting out EM signals everywhere we go, right? It's mind boggling how much of it we transmit.
150 years ago, yes there were those little peeps in space we could have measured, but here on earth, it was pretty much dead fucking silent... The difference is absolutely fucking WILD if you think about it... A time lapse video of the past 100 years would look like an apocalyptical explosion :)
That would be a really cool visualization
You're rad. I wish you were my high school science teacher.
It reminds me of an old writing prompt idea I saw on the other site. Basically the setup was that exactly after twice an amount of light-time had passed for all the radio waves we invented in the last two centuries to have reached some nearby star in the milky way, we get a transmission from that star that says "be quiet, they'll hear you!"