John Clark wrote:
>
> Michael S. Lorrey <retroman@turbont.net> Wrote:
>
> > Now, space is not a true vacuum.
>
> About one hydrogen atom per cubic yard.
Great, so lets say you've got a yard square laser beam, traveling 10 light
years.
186,000 mps x 60 s/m x 60m/h x 8760 h/yr x 1760 yds/m = 1.0324e+16 atoms/ly
Now, how many air molecules are there in a given volume at sea level? At 50,000
feet altitude? I'll bet that the above calculated number of atoms is sufficient
to allow interference to occur to some degree.
>
> >In which case, there WILL be interference over interstellar
> >distances, as I said.
>
> Then why do our telescopes work over interstellar distances?
Sure they work, but not perfectly. They can't see whats on the other side of
nebulae, and they can't see planets around stars. Their resolution is quite far
from perfect, even if Hubble had a perfect lense, it would still not get perfect
resolution. We are talking about sensing intelligent signals, either radio or
laser, but you seem to deny there could be any signal degradation, either due to
natural or unnatural causes.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 02 2000 - 17:38:39 MDT