SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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.)