Comments by "Digital Nomad" (@digitalnomad9985) on "John Michael Godier" channel.

  1. Your conclusion does not follow from your premise. Longevity would work as well as FTL, and might have other benefits, too.
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  2. They become fainter in accordance with the inverse square law. They might be partly absorbed my dust or gas in the interstellar medium. At some point, it would become difficult to discern the signal from natural radio noise. But Carl Sagan's team sent a message toward a distant galaxy using the Arecibo radiotelescope dish as a transmitting antenna and I remember reading at the time that that dish was theoretically capable of communicating with a similar instrument in the target galaxy (with long round trip communication times, of course). For that kind of tuning in you would about have to know with great precision in advance exactly where the signal was coming from to have a quantifiable chance of picking up the signal. Communication within a galaxy is correspondingly easier, but easy is a relative term. Locking on and holding the signal is easy. Finding it is hard, because we don't know where to focus, and we have to listen everywhere.
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  3. There is one reason why radio is likely to be a listening medium for civs that want to communicate with others. It will offer the greatest potential quantity of correspondents because it is the first technology a civ is likely to develop which is capable of interstellar communication. All first contact communication (we have experience with this historically and with field anthropology, and it makes logical sense) starts with the least common denominator.
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  4. And heavier-than-air flight is impossible. Pattern recognition is one of the central talents of human intelligence. Are you an alien?
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