LONDON
- Writing, rather than phoning, is probably the best way to contact extraterrestrials,
American scientists said Wednesday.
So
instead of phoning home, it could have been more energy efficient if E.T.
had inscribed information and physically sent it, because radio waves disperse
as they travel.
“Think of a flashlight beam,”
Professor Christopher Rose of Rutgers University, who reported his finding
in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature,
explained in a written statement. “Its intensity decreases as it gets farther
from its source. The same is true of the beam of a laser pointer, though
the distance is much longer.”
Rose and his colleague,
physicist Gregory Wright, were pondering how to get the most bits per second
over a wireless channel when they concluded that the detectability of a signal
diminishes with distance.
If the recipient isn’t
listening or misses it, the message may have to be sent numerous times, but
a physical message encoded in an object lands somewhere and stays there.
Messages from aliens could possibly be embedded in organic material in an asteroid, for example.
“If
haste is unimportant, sending messages inscribed in some material can be
strikingly more efficient than communicating by electronic waves,” Rose said.
Copyright
2004 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution
of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent
of Reuters.
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