Researchers: ET Should Write, Not Call: need your opinion please....(for voting purpose)

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kai_25

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A fresh perspective on searching for aliens suggests ET is more likely to send us something akin to a message in a bottle rather than relying on energy-intensive, inefficient radio messages.<br /><br />The professional hunt for ET depend largely on huge telescopes that scan for electronic intelligence in the ether, on the assumption that an brainy, technologically advanced civilization might try to reach out to others, or that their communications would leak into space. <br /><br />But sending a signal across the cosmos is expensive an inefficient, argues Christopher Rose, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rutgers University. The idea is detailed in the Aug. 25 issue of the journal Nature.<br /><br />Tortoise and hare<br /><br />Rose and physicist Gregory Wright initially set out to learn how to send the most information over a wireless channel. They then considered the amount of energy needed to send a signal over greater distances. As logic suggests, more energy is needed to send a message farther, and the signal weakens.<br /><br />Radio waves, laser beams or X-ray pulses and other electromagnetic signals all travel at the speed of light. But the farther they go, the more they disperse. That makes them harder to detect.<br /><br />"Think of a flashlight beam," Rose said. "Its intensity decreases as it gets farther from its source."<br /><br />Seth Shostak knows about this problem. Shostak worked on the SETI Institute's Project Phoenix, a just-finished search for extraterrestrial radio signals (they didn't hear any) that was the most comprehensive so far. Not involved in Rose's research, Shostak wrote recently that sending a barely detectable radio-based signal across 100 light-years and in all directions would require 100 billion watts of power. Translation: You'd have to focus the output of all American power plants to do the job.<br /><br /><br />Interstellar radio programs face another problem in garnering listeners. Once an electronic signal passes its int
 
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