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The signals we're sending

 


The human species has been sending signals into outer space since Marconi's day. After all, once radio waves are out there, they just keep going. Marconi's first crude experiments, at his family estate in Italy, took place in the middle 1890s -- so, 130 years ago. 

Famously, less than 20 years later the radio operators of The Titanic stayed at their posts on that awful night in April 1912 tapping out Morse code distress signals. 

In principle, an extraterrestrial intelligence one hundred and fourteen light years away from us could even now be picking up on those signals. What do such beings make of them?  Do they take them to be evidence that "we Fl'korgians are not alone!"? 

There is a rhythm to them -- those signals from The Titanic -- that likely seems an intelligent construction. Dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot. Pause and repeat. Over and over. 

My guess is that if the Fl'korgians have technology powerful enough to pick up on that pattern at that distance, they can figure out that it is not the result of natural causes. These are not odd electromagnetic byproducts of a volcano rumbling.  They ARE the EM byproducts of an industrial civilization on a planet hospitable to the development of such. So they might be deemed. 

In that crude sense then ... a signal of our existence is going out. 

By parity of reasoning, signals from the Fl'korgians are likely also going out and have been coming our way for a long time.  Which is why we as an inquisitive species are wise to listen. But, again, Enrico Fermi's old question: why haven't we heard anything? 

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