re: #31 The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge

As for being impossible to detect, you know the old saying: “Any sufficiently advanced communication is indistinguishable from noise.” People need to think about that when they talk about eavesdropping on alien signals. After having radio for barely a century, they couldn’t get anything out of our signals.

This is true: by information theory, a signal with maximum information throughput is going to look like white noise. And, of course, any signal that is received by an unintended recipient is wasted energy. So, if aliens are in any way efficient, we won’t notice their communications. Of course, given the amount of power that these sorts of space-capable civilizations would need to operate at any reasonable level, they may have access to powerful energy sources and not give a shit about wasting it.

I listened to an interesting podcast a while ago on the history of lighting, and the cost of a candle’s worth of light over the ages. It dropped from days’ worth of commoners’ work in ancient times to essentially nothing today, and changed the character of our civilizations.