Italiancrazybread1 t1_j9txjdp wrote on February 24, 2023 at 3:18 PM

Reply to comment by JohnnyUtah_QB1 in Would an Earth-like planet with identical technology be able to detect signals from us? by lukinhasb

You technically can pick out very low signals from the background noise if the signal is repeated continuously, or for at least a long enough time that the receiver gets all the information from the signal.

This is how we are able to receive signals from the voyager probes from so far away. The probes repeat their signal many times because here on Earth we likely won't get the full message the first time. Every time the message gets sent, we decipher more and more of the message.

JohnnyUtah_QB1 t1_j9tzhvt wrote on February 24, 2023 at 3:30 PM

I presume that estimation was accounting for that. The fact that signal power exponentially diminishes over distance is really challenging for us.

In the context of these distances Voyager has barely walked out the front door. It's just 0.002 Light Years away. At 100 Light Years away its signal would be 5 million times fainter than it is now, many order of magnitude below the detection threshold of any equipment that exists. No amount of listening with current technology would ever detect that energy level