Impractical Python Projects: Playful Programming Activities to Make You Smarter by Lee Vaughan

Author:Lee Vaughan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781593278915
Publisher: No Starch Press, Inc.
Published: 2019-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

L

50 × 106

1 × 109

N

7.9 × 106

15.6 × 106

**midpoint of ranges shown

For input to your program, you can use the estimates in the table, those you find online, or those you calculate yourself (in the final column of the table).

Selecting Radio Bubble Dimensions

Radio waves that aren’t focused into a beam for targeted transmission are incidental. Think of these as “planet leakage.” Because we choose not to broadcast our presence to aliens who might come and eat us, almost all of our transmissions are incidental. These transmissions currently form an expanding sphere around Earth with a diameter of around 225 light-years (LY).

A 225 LY bubble sounds impressive, but it is the detectable size that really matters. A radio wave front is subject to the inverse square law, which means it continuously loses power density as it expands. Additional power loss can result from absorption or scattering. At some point, the signal becomes too weak to separate from background noise. Even with our best technology—the radio telescopes of the Breakthrough Listen program—we could detect our own radio bubble only out to about 16 LY.

Since we’re really investigating why we haven’t detected aliens, you should assume, for this project, that other civilizations have technology similar to our own. Another assumption should be that, like us, all aliens have a paranoid planetary consciousness and aren’t broadcasting “here we are” signals that would announce their presence. Investigating incidental bubble sizes ranging from a little smaller than those currently detectable to those a little larger than our own transmissions should be a reasonable place to start. This would suggest a diameter range of 30 to 250 LY. Although we can’t detect a 250 LY bubble, it will be interesting to see what the odds would be if we could.

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