You start out in Earth's orbit, then push back through the cosmos with a running ticker of how many light-minutes, -hours, or -years you are from our planet. Depending on how far you are from Earth, you'll hear a chart-topping song from the corresponding month or year. You can either just kick back and enjoy the ride, scroll your mouse wheel to activate hyperdrive, or manually scrub through time and space using the timeline on the left of the site.
It may sound complicated, but calculating the reach of radio waves over time and space is really straightforward. Radio waves travel at the speed of light, so if you were one light year away from Earth—that's 5.9 trillion miles—you'd hear broadcasts from a year ago. And it may have taken New Horizons nearly a decade to get close to Pluto, but the dwarf planet is a mere five light-hours or so from Earth. Every known planet or former planet in our solar system would still be hearing contemporary jams broadcast in the last few hours.
Three of the members (writer Chris Baker, developer Mike Lacher, and designer Brian Moore) of Lightyear.fm's team have worked together before on independent creative projects. Lacher built the audio system for the site, Moore designed the site interface, and Baker made sure the tunes were legit.
So Gliese 86 is listening to the best metal guitar riff of all time.
Original Submission
(Score: 2, Touché) by Fishscene on Wednesday July 15 2015, @04:55PM
You can bet your last nickle that if it were ever discovered an alien species was listening to these, the RIAA would push "corporate/american/humanity's" "best interests" and try to figure out how to charge non-Earth life forms for listening. Because who even if you're 100 lightyears away, you still need to pay artists long dead.
I know I am not God, because every time I pray to Him, it's because I'm not perfect and thankful for what He's done.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday July 15 2015, @05:00PM
I'm sure they would want to charge them, but how would they collect? I think our nearest Alien Species listening in is safe from RIAA Suits for at least a few more years.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Funny) by Tork on Wednesday July 15 2015, @08:36PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday July 16 2015, @05:24PM
This is probably proof there are no aliens paying attention to us. Beaming what passes for most popular music would be an incitement to attack us.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday July 15 2015, @05:31PM
Maybe there are many transmitters and transmissions in the galaxy, and they are just noisy [wikipedia.org]:
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2015, @05:46PM
On top of all that is the amount of noise things like stars give off limits the distance it will go before it basically becomes noise itself. Eventually the power to drive those waves will taper off and the signal will basically be lost amongst all the other signals out there. There just simply would not be enough signal to lock onto as the energy would be spread across billions of km of space.
Think I heard voyager is currently at -120 or so db. And that is with directional antennas.
An interesting experiment NASA could do is to see if they can hear standard FM/AM radio stations from say Pluto. We know they can do their stuff but what about standard radio?
These sorts of stories assume the signal even got past our own atmosphere.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by boristhespider on Wednesday July 15 2015, @06:31PM
And on top of that most transmissions now are digital and would be pretty much impossible for anyone to decode - and that's even before the signals are encrypted. That means as time goes on signals are going to look more and more like noise, despite being genuine transmissions. That's before we also take into account improvements in efficiencies and technology that reduce leakage from the atmosphere. From the experience of our own civilisation we can speculate that we've got around 100-150 years of broadcasts that could possibly be captured and reasonably readily decoded - and in the early days the volume will be low and down towards the noise floor, while as time goes on new encoding techniques will result in the signal drowning in rather louder noise...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Wednesday July 15 2015, @08:48PM
Moreover today more and more of our transmissions go mainly through cable and directed links, rather than being broadcast, with the exception of the last step (cell tower to cell phone, access point to mobile device) which is too low power to even be detected/decoded a fairly short distance away here on earth.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by boristhespider on Wednesday July 15 2015, @10:49PM
Also very true.
At the minute it's not looking all that good for the Fermi paradox, really.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2015, @06:46PM
The more plausible explanation is that we're part of an ancestor / civilization simulation. See "Simulation Argument".
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 15 2015, @05:35PM
You could express how out of touch the local legacy radio broadcasters are in parsecs, interesting, never thought of it that way.
I wonder if professional astronomers have the same feeling for parsecs as engineers have for hogsheads and slugs (as units).
(Score: 2) by boristhespider on Wednesday July 15 2015, @06:35PM
That depends what an engineer's feelings are about hogsheads and slugs. Parsecs are the daily units - no-one really uses light-years professionally since the lowest and most definite rung on the distance ladder is set by parallax. Astronomical scales are then judged in parsecs. Alpha Centauri is then around a parsec away (and a parsec is the characteristic separation between stars in our part of the galaxy); star clusters are roughly 100 parsecs across; the galaxy is around 10-20kpc across and the kpc is a characterstic scale for galaxies; galaxies are separated by 20-150kpc; and galaxy clusters are around a megaparsec in size and upwards. The universe begins to look homogeneous at around roughly 200-300Mpc, and the characteristic scale for cosmology is a gigaparsec. They're not some odd, old-fashioned legacy unit - they're what's used every day...
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2015, @05:48PM
Javascript, cookies, XHR, and a whole slew of domains you need to pull data from.
The web is broken!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2015, @06:22PM
LOL they say it doesn't even work over time, it was just hardcoded for today's date. People will print anything these days. The worst part is, being in a news headline probably helps these guys get better jobs where they can write broken pointless software for tons of money.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Wednesday July 15 2015, @08:20PM
Maybe that's why it didn't work for me. My browser won't accept 3rd party cookies and I have to give permission for java script to run. At 69 light years out, all I got was hip hop and rap. I'd have thought in 1947 most pop music would be jazz: Big Band and BeBop.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Wednesday July 15 2015, @11:47PM
Doesn't work for me either, I just wanted to check if the music is sped up or slowed down correctly while traveling from or to earth.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2015, @06:35PM
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Wednesday July 15 2015, @08:31PM
Right they were just a group that copied Led Zeppelin's riffs and cord style. They were OK but a few years to late for acid rock.
Also if you're going to link to a specific song, as in the summary, do it right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAgnJDJN4VA [youtube.com]
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday July 16 2015, @01:50AM
Haha I linked to Wikipedia because some people don't like links to pages with sound on autoplay.
Funny, though, I expected my choice of greatest metal guitar riff of all time to be contested. That, it appears, I nailed. :-)
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Thursday July 16 2015, @02:34AM
he he...there are so many great guitar riffs out there now. I kinda like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aCOMU6qpJI [youtube.com]
Or...how about these guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMEzFgCLv8c [youtube.com]
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday July 16 2015, @03:44AM
Clapton is phenomenal. I saw him live at St. John of the Divine [stjohndivine.org] playing a private benefit for Bill Clinton a few years ago. He played "Layla," "Cocaine," and "Crossroads." Some musicians do fine in the studio but not so well live, but Clapton is 100% the real deal.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Thursday July 16 2015, @04:30AM
So true. B.B. and J.J. weren't exactly chopped liver either. :-)
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Thursday July 16 2015, @04:44AM
Eric Clapton for several years every three years would put on the "Crossroads Guitar Festival". All the musicians here hand picked by Clapton. I think some of the best electric guitar music ever came out of that fest. Such as Carlos and Eric: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n2d1_OIHZ4 [youtube.com]
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2015, @08:47AM
Zeppelin? *yaaaaaawwwwwn*
(Score: 1) by Bogsnoticus on Friday July 17 2015, @05:47AM
Nobody who is into AC/DC considers AC/DC to be AC/DC anymore. AC/DC died with Bon Scott. In comparison, Brian Johnson is a one lunged asthmatic with emphysema.
Genius by birth. Evil by choice.
(Score: 5, Informative) by wonkey_monkey on Wednesday July 15 2015, @06:50PM
http://lightyear.fm/ [lightyear.fm]
Did no-one think that would have been a useful thing to put in the summary?
Depending on how far you are from Earth, you’ll hear a chart-topping song from the corresponding month or year. You can either just kick back and enjoy the ride, scroll your mouse wheel to activate hyperdrive, or manually scrub through time and space using the timeline on the left of the site.
It may sound complicated
No it doesn't.
(they did still manage to play the wrong version of Candle in the Wind, though)
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Wednesday July 15 2015, @08:34PM
Well it was so complicated that they couldn't code it so so it works in HTML.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2015, @08:05PM
Really? Distance = velocity times time, or rather, time = distance/velocity? Who exactly is the intended audience here that would think it would be so complicated?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by iWantToKeepAnon on Wednesday July 15 2015, @08:46PM
AM and FM transmitters are not that high power and they are not pointed at space. Doesn't most of the signal bounce back off the ionosphere? And what escapes gets mixed with solar radiation/noise/ionization. (I'm totally shooting from the hip here so forgive my ignorant use of terms ...)
So this might be a fun thought experiment, but if you're far enough out for the time-shift to kick in; you won't have squat to listen to. Right?
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2015, @10:53PM
The radiation goes off in all directions. Under certain ionospheric conditions some of the wavelengths will bounce back, but it depends upon the frequency. Early evening, AM stations bounce back very effectively, but not during the daytime. High frequency stuff just goes on through day or night. What does escape gets added to the background signal. In principal, you could pull it out if you were clever enough (frequency combs, lock-in amplifiers, and so forth), but you do get dispersion and the power drops off quickly. The dispersion is one reason the bit rates to deep space spacecraft are so low. Your bits have to be long enough that they don't spread into neighboring bits, which means you need low bit rates.
(Score: 3, Informative) by FakeBeldin on Thursday July 16 2015, @09:10AM
It's not quite true, e.g. because "the strength of a radio signal diminishes by the square of the distance from the source." (source [quora.com]).
Moreover, technology has improved - we're better at aiming signals, and wasting less energy on sending signals into deep space that are only intended for Earth.
The inverse square law [wikipedia.org] really is what limits such messages in the end. Even the Arecibo message [wikipedia.org], a message sent towards another galaxy, will degrade long before it arrives. If I remember correctly, we can get a coded signal somewhere into the tens of lightyear, and such signals can be detected as being artificial (but no information can be recovered) at distances of 600-900 lightyear.
And that is if we use the state of the art, high-powered, directed transmitters.
Given the enormous amounts of space between stellar systems, and the inverse square law, don't count on an FM radio broadcast being picked up by any extraterrestrials.
(note that AM propagates worse on Earth.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2015, @08:48PM
It's a resource hog. Chrome is using 80% CPU on a dual core and almost 1.5G Ram with one tab open.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2015, @09:46PM
And that's without scrolling the mousewheel. Scrolling eats up 100% and the audio breaks up. Nice attempt, but no bozo button for you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2015, @09:08PM
This article assumes the signals are actually understandable. Does anybody know how far away radio waves/TV waves/etc can transmit before they effectively become static undifferentiated to background radiation due to the inverse square law?
I had always assumed it would be a few light years (maybe enough to reach a couple of nearby stars... maybe), but don't actually know.
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Thursday July 16 2015, @09:23AM
I don't have the source on hand, but I looked into this recently for the list of interstellar messages [wikipedia.org].
If I remember correctly, the most powerful amongst them are decodable up to something like 30-60 light years, and are detectable as artificial roughly up to 600-900 lightyears.
See also here [briankoberlein.com] for some more info, and the quote from wiki on active SETI [wikipedia.org]:
One proposal for a 10 billion watt interstellar SETI beacon was dismissed by Robert A. Freitas Jr. to be infeasible for a pre-Type I civilization on the Kardashev scale.[27] As a result it has been suggested that civilizations must advance into Type I before mustering the energy required for reliable contact with other civilizations.
However,...[a] multibeam approach can reduce the power and cost to levels that are reasonable with current mid-2000s Earth technology.
.