1) Message boards : SETI@home Science : Why are we just listening? Not transmitting? (Message 1224801) Posted 29 Apr 2012 by Dark Zealot Post: I think it all comes down to cost on our end of things. It may be the same for life out there. Listening is not as resource consuming as transmitting would be. For any signal to retain its integrity, it must be transmitted with a fair amount of power. Also, the wider a field you want to cover, the more energy you have to use. You could send out a signal in a very narrow beam and make it fairly powerful, kinda like the ones Arecibo has sent out, but it will only cover a very narrow area of space. Degradation of the signal takes over and soon all you have is garble after only a few light years. Anyway, thats my theory. Everyone sends out little snippets, since transmitting uses so much power. Some worlds may not have as much energy readily available as ours, and the ones that do may think similar to the way they do and decided is better to listen.

2) Message boards : SETI@home Science : Why are we just listening? Not transmitting? (Message 1224800) Posted 29 Apr 2012 by Dark Zealot Post: Maybe everyone knows the chatty ones go away first...

 
©2024 University of California
 
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.