LogFAQs > #949780311

indica posted...

Very true, space is fucking huge. But do you really think we'd have the ability to, as you way, use relativistic kill missles to take out our own old radio signals? I think that if intelligent life ever encounters us, it will start with finding those signals, and even if we learn to mask ourselves as some point in the future, those signals would be a dead give away.

No, of course we couldn't remove our already-sent signals. They're out there, and there's nothing we can do about it. At this point, our only hope is that either nobody notices them or the dark forest theory is wrong. The RKM doesn't have anything to do with the signals. They're for killing the planets/systems the signals are coming from. If somebody spots us and wants to shut us up, they just send a small hunk of mass in our direction, slowly accelerating the whole way. By the time it reaches us, it's going a significant fraction of light-speed. It'd be too small and dark for us to see it on approach, and when it hits Earth we're just gone. Simple, cheap, and should be relatively easy for a proper interstellar civilization. Pretty much zero defense against it, too.

Nobody noticing our signals is more likely than you might think, though. The further away they get from Earth, the weaker they are and the higher the signal-to-noise ration becomes. At some distance, it would become pretty much impossible to discern our radio signals from just random background noise.

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