Doesn't the inverse square law diminish and change that radiation?
Yeah. Especially with normal radio/TV signals, I'm pretty sure. Unfortunately, we already purposely sent out a more powerful signal back in the 70's.
In 1974, the most powerful broadcast ever deliberately beamed into space was made from Puerto Rico. The broadcast formed part of the ceremonies held to mark a major upgrade to the Arecibo Radio Telescope.
www.seti.org
Here's what it looked like.
C'mon, man it literally looks like some Space Invaders shit! What are we doing here?!?!
But I could definitely see our species (in the far future) doing that, if our history with more native, less technologically developed people is any indication.
I'd like to think that most aliens would be cool, like ET. But the thing is... all it takes is one shitty alien species to send the entire galaxy spinning into a Dark Forest state.
There's also the concept of a "Prisoner's Dilemma". Given the distances involved, you can't have a real time convo with aliens. A one-way message takes decades or centuries to reach its destination. How are you supposed to conduct diplomacy that way?
I mean... if you discover another intelligent species, it's almost
rational to wipe them out immediately. Because you don't know if they have good intentions. And waiting around centuries to have a conversation and find out puts all life in your solar system at risk.
The odds are we're going to have someone visit us before we're visiting any other civilization, so we're going to be the native, less technologically developed life forms in that scenario...
They're making a Netflix series out of an awesome Chinese book series that discusses the whole "Dark Forest" problem. I think it comes out in March.
There's another hypothesis from those books that freaks me out a little when I'm really ripped on a sativa.
You might say, why worry about all this alien/Dark Forest shit? There's no evidence of aliens, dummy. But at the same time, how would we know? Are we
sure we know what black holes really are, for example
.
In the books they call it the Shooter/Farmer Hypotheses.
Maybe what we call "natural laws" are actually the results of wars between aliens with awesome technological powers. Probably not. But, imo, we should probably shut the fuck up as a species. Just in case.