Search for Intelligence on Earth

[newjerseyrunner]

I was discussing the Fermi Paradox with a coworker at lunch and he made a very good point that I hadn’t considered and I don’t really hear mentioned on the topic: distribution.

The assumption that if ET was everywhere, we should see it everywhere. The point was that that should be true for humanity on Earth as well.

We’ve for all practical purposes completely covered the planet as thoroughly as Id expect a colonizing species to cover its cosmic neighborhood.

I play Geoguesser. It is very common to be plopped down in a location where the only sign of humanity is the road the street view is on. And this is because GeoGuessr only comes from that sample on roads.

But if you truly plopped down on a random location on Earth with binoculars and maybe even a radio receiver, how likely would you be able to detect humanity? 2/3 of the time, you’d be in the ocean. Huge chunks of the planet are covered in ice, desert, forest…

We tried to Google various things and couldn’t really figure out a way to quantify it. You could probably see a mile or two on average? At high elevations it’ll be far longer, in dense jungles it’ll be essentially zero.

 

[berkeman]

That's silly (best family friendly adjective that I could come up with on short notice).

Give me a loincloth and a crystal radio and a long wire, and I can detect radio transmissions pretty much anywhere on Earth. It may take me 12 hours to do so (Quiz Question -- why?), but it's pretty much a certainty.

Well, technically I don't need the loincloth, but again, just trying to keep this PF thread family-friendly.

https://www.dga.org/Craft/DGAQ/All-Articles/1202-Spring-2012/Shot-to-Remember-The-Right-Stuff.aspx

 

[DaveC426913]

In drawing an analogy between the Earth and ... the galaxy, why would you limit your Earth observations to binoculars? That severely limits your observations to the horizon.

We can see through the back side of our galaxy, into the next one, on out of the local cluster, all the way to the CMBR.

If we were to analogize that to Earth, you ought to be able to see, well (pi to the e, carry the one) 12,500 miles in any direction.