Time Odyssey

Okay THIS is just plain weird. Doritos sending advertisements out into space. I don’t know about you but I get the feeling that rampant consumerism is not exactly going to be the hallmark of an advanced civilization. Think Ferengis on Start Trek.

Regardless – I didn’t know that ESA had a series of high powered radar stations up near the Arctic Circle. Which of course sort of begs a question since the old mind then is going a mile a minute. If we really wanted to communicate with other civilizations out there, assuming they exist, then why would we be beaming communications out along the galaxy’s central plane? Would it not make more sense to beam any transmissions out parallel to our solar system’s axis?

Here is my reasoning. Almost all the really key discoveries in terms of astrophysics that have been made in the last 50 years or so have come about because some galaxy, sun, or solar system was facing almost perpendicular to the way we were looking at the time. To me that would suggest that any type of communication signal would be more readily picked up by civilizations that are perpendicular to ours since any advanced civilization which was looking for signs of life would be naturally predisposed to be looking at those xray, gamma, and other sources which are aligned towards their home planet.

The other thing I was thinking of is this whole concept of using radio and other types of artificially generated electromagnetic radiation as a basis of communication. This assumes that someone is out there actually listening which requires specialized equipment that may only be relevant to a specific period of time in a civilization’s development. To some degree this doesn’t make sense.

Why not think at a much more basic level. How did early Native American’s communicate? Smoke Signals. The idea of getting a fire going with poor combustion so that it creates a lot of smoke in a stream and then interrupting that stream with a blanket creating gaps or messages through the size and timing of the smoke puffs.

The idea here is simply this – put some type of a deflector in front of the sun in order to block out the sun’s radiation in a pattern representing a series of primes or fibonaccinumbers which are not naturally occurring. (the first 100 numbers of pi might also work). The effect would be both instant and long ranging allowing us to more effectively cover larger areas of space.  If you put a solar deflector of sufficient size out at a given distance from the sun so that it either partially or completely blocked out the radiation from the sun – that blockage would extend out more or less forever for whatever number of arc-seconds of the sky the array was designed to address.

The effect is similar to that of opening an umbrella. The sun is very big, but an umbrella will block out the sun’s rays even through it is very small. The farther away from the sun you are, the smaller the size of the deflector array you need in order to generate the effect. The trade off however is that the number of arc-seconds you can cover in this way is very small. However, if done in a strategically placed location, such blockages should be more effective than sending radio signals.

The reason is that it is far more likely that someone out there will be looking at us with a telescope than a radio astronomy dish as there are far more interesting things out there to tune into that a Doritos commercial – regardless of how long they stay fresh. – K