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Entry: East of the Sun, West of the Moon Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/east_of_the_sun_west_of_the_moon#17770 Post contents: The Beatles were over-rated in their time, but they had lots of good stuff. You have to discount the junk they put out after they burned out; intoxicated with a bit of everything plus the demigod status conferred on them, it was pretty much inevitable that they would start turning out crap. I do agree with most of Taki's judgment of the good stuff. The main point is that broadcasts over light years are going to be lost in the noise, even if the aliens have dishes miles across. A sphere 10 light years across is 1.2 x 10exp19 square meters. If they have a dish 10 km in diameter, they will receive 1 twenty trillionth of the broadcast signal. If they knew where we were and the frequency we were using we would still need billions of watts to get them a signal that won't be lost in the noise. This falls off as the inverse square, and Polaris is a thousand light years away, OK? Nobody is going to get our signal, and we're not going to get theirs unless they can harness an appreciable part of a solar output for their station. My guess is that this is funding related. HTH, Phil Sent at: 2008 11 22