Re:Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative...
by chc on Tuesday July 21, 2015 @02:13PM
(#9924440)
The GP was talking about how we're quieter now (i.e. using lower-powered radio signals), and you replied that we're louder because we have a lot of light pollution nowadays. My point was that AFAIK light pollution does not produce a signal for detecting life. We're producing louder noise and a quieter signal.
I'm not a physicist, but my understanding is that all EM frequencies -- visible light, radio, infrared, etc -- travel away from earth at the same speed (c). Since space has (almost) nothing to slow them down, then they'll just keep going forever. Thus, "strength" (however you want to measure it) is largely irrelevant so long as the signal it produces is detectable apart from all the other outgoing information. So the "light" broadcast from a TV tower is the same as the light from a spotlight at a shopping mall, in terms of its ability to travel through space and get noticed by aliens.
The only exception I can think of would be our atmospheric interference. Some light may penetrate our own cloud layers better than others. So all light may not be created equal, in that sense.