The last 110 years of radio... in space!

[Wraithious]

Wow, so I came across this website Lightyear.fm that shows how if any aliens are able to hear our radio station broadcasts this is what they would be hearing right now from distances ranging from earth orbit to 110 light years away, really cool! check it out, the further out you get the more garbled it sounds due to wave distance distortion

 

[roytheshort]

It's amazing how 24 years ago the music becomes nightmarish, as if suddenly everyone died and then we all pretended it didn't happen.

Spoiler

 

[Ninety]

Movie called Contact has a very interesting take on this

 

[chance]

...the further out you get the more garbled it sounds due to wave distance distortion

The "distortion" in those old recordings is mostly caused by the limited technology when they were made, not the propagation distance. The propagation distance mainly affects the signal strength per unit area.

There's also some wavelength dispersion effects, but those are secondary. (At least in these particular examples.)

Cool website, either way.

 

[Wraithious]

@chance Yes, definatly agree with the technology aspect, and the dispersion effects, also there's most likely other forces at work there like graity waves and possibly the massive amounts of different types of radiation beyond our solar system. Like @roytheshort said it starts to get really noticable from 24 years and further on It's very interesting and something I want to study further, now I'm wonderi g if some of these 'radio bursts' that seti and others have seen auch as the WOW signal may actually be some sort of reflections of our own transmissions that .ay have been reflected back to us for fleeting moments.
@Ninety I had forgotten about that movie! I'll be rewatching it now to refresh my memory on that.

 

[chance]

... it starts to get really noticable from 24 years and further on (snip)

(I believe Roy was joking about the music quality).

Either way... far as I can tell from that website, those songs have not been distorted to simulate long propagation though interstellar space. So any difference you're hearing is just the quality of the original recording -- and maybe some static added.

But those space effects are real, and definitely affect signals that aliens might hear from Earth. Of course, it depends on their line-of-sight. Signals traveling through near-perfect vacuum wouldn't be distorted much. But signals traveling through long regions of ionized gas would get very distorted. It all depends on the space between us and them. So it's not the same for all alien "listeners".

Turns out, SETI researchers actually spend lots of effort trying to understand how alien broadcasts might sound to us, after propagating through different space environments. The effects (per length) are tiny, but the path lengths may be thousands of light years. So tiny effects add up.

 

[roytheshort]

I believe Roy was joking

I never joke.

 

[Wraithious]

But those space effects are real, and definitely affect signals that aliens might hear from Earth. Of course, it depends on their line-of-sight.

Yes most definatly, and speaking of line of sight the wow signal

Came from a dwarf galaxy in the Sagittarius constellation which is 70,000 lightyears away, so if it was a broadcast of some sort it makes sense at that distance that there would be plenty of things in our line of sight to have made the signal so obscure and mysterious, there probably is too many things in the way actually, and by pure luck back in 1977 possibly there was a 70 minute window of minimal obstruction allowing it to reach us, space is fascinating to me.