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jpdoane t1_j9tqg86 wrote

RF engineer here.

This is an excellent question that I wish more people would think about. Almost every RF signal generated by humans would be impossible to detect by another earth even a few light years away due to spreading loss.

Detection of a link across interstellar distances requires all of the following:

  • Extremely high transmit power (megawatts)
  • Extremely high gain, highly directional transmitter (e.g Arecibo type dish)
  • Extremely high gain, highly directional receiver (another Arecibo)
  • Both antennas pointing exactly at each other at the correct time (the beamwidth of Arecibo was just a few arcmin, covering about 5e-8 of the sky)
  • Extremely narrow bandwidth and/or completely deterministic signal (very little information)

Our terrestrial RF emissions do not meet these criteria and could not be observable by another earth. Certainly not broadcast signals like radio/tv. The only signals that possibly could be detected are the few times we have intentionally transmitted a beacon from Arecibo, but given the infrequency of these, the likelihood anyone was listing in our direction is very low.

Feel free to play with this tool yourself: https://www.satsig.net/seticalc.htm

Edit: I just ran the numbers: an Arecibo-like dish (300m, 20K noise temp) could detect a typical TV broadcast (1MW, 6MHz, 0dBi antenna) to a distance of 5.3AU, about the distance to Jupiter.

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