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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: 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.