Nobody Is Listening, Not Even Us

Everybody loves the idea of science fiction becoming reality and Aliens finding us, sharing their warp drive tech, like the Vulcans do in a certain popular franchise.

But. If you go out to the stars, lets say the closest likely to have a planet, Proxima Centauri B (I think), and the angles between us, the Sun and that star become tiny. So, for radio purposes you have effectively a straight line between that remote plane, the Earth and the Sun. The Sun is the biggest radio transmitter in our solar system, literally emitting every electromagnetic frequency from DC to daylight and beyond, at powers so high, that even the most powerful TV transmitter on the planet has a signal strength at the tower that's like a fart in a hurricane,compared to the sun.

Sure, we receive radio by tuning a bandpass filter to block out the background noise and receive the signal. So, now imagine 2 transmitters and a receiver laid out in a straight line. One is a licenced 10kW FM radio station, then a few metres down the road is the local anarchists' pirate 25w transmitter on a nearby channel, finally, 20km across town I'm trying to hear what those crazy leftists have to say about the world... "Hmm, they must not be transmitting today. Bugger." If we magnify everything except the pirate radio station by the scale of space-to-the-town-where-those-anarachist-DJs-and-I-live and you get........ just infinite broadband noise, plus blips, of space....

hissssssssssssssssssssssss-click-ssssssssssssssssssssssssss-pop-sssss...

We can learn a lot from stars by "listening" to their broadband RF emissions all the way through to watching their light signals. Anything on a nearby (to the star) exoplanet is lost. Now reverse that. That's what I'm talking about. Nobody. Can. Listen.... to intelligent radio signals from a blue/green, wet, rocky planet under mother Sol's skirts, anyway. There's no Nuremberg Rally TV broadcast. There's no Australian Top 40 from 1977. All there is is the infinite hissing crackling and popping of infinite stars. The planets only visible in the optical spectrum as shadows. Any radio brodcasts would be like tring to see a flea on an elephant from 1000km away.

It gets worse... or better?

When you look at culture, we can't even agree on WAV, MP3, FLAC or AIFF as a standard audio format, streaming gets worse because of encryption (which hides intelligence by disguising it as noise. Yes, that's an oversimplification but it describes the effect.) The maths of AM, SSB and FM are likely to be understandable by any radio capable culture but, to really get out into outer space, we need digital encoding. Binary might make sense to other species, but bitrates and even byte or word lengths are quite abitrary, then compression algorithms are totally arbitrary and, without the key, the signal is noise. And then, encryption... again. These problems work both ways, us listening for them, them listening for us.

Finally, a civilisation that can communicate across relativistic distances? They're entangling quants, and we don't even know quite how to do that quite yet, at least not for communication and information exchange.

All of this means, a radio-level culture can communicate intrasolar, but not interstellar. A quantum cuture can probably communicate interstellar-ly (ugh), but we can't hear them yet, probably won't hear them, either, because quantum signals are inherently encrypted and probably uncrackable. (First Law of cryptography: nothing is uncrackable, you just don't know how to crack it yet.) Even if a quantum culture can crack quantum signals, it's because they know the number systems and cultural cues of their fellow planetary citizens.

In short... Everybody intelligent is, broadcasting or will eventually. Everybody thinks they're listening but they don't really know what they're trying to hear. Nobody across the the void can understand us, anymore than we can understand them because the evolutionary effects on cultural differences will create life so different to ours, experience so different to ours, even numbering systems so different to ours, that we will need to meet them before we will know they exist.

We might stumble across a quantum transmission one day, because we accidentally pick an encoding that randomly is the same as some other people on some other planet around some other star. But that's like buying a lottery ticket, hoping to pay an impossible bill.

Until we can travel at superluminal speeds, we're not meeting any aliens. And again, everybody is probably trying to listen, nobody can listen. First contact will be person to person, and even that will be fraught with misunderstandings, even with the best wills in the universe.