claudeb | Reading

Books
Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets, by Dorothy Armstrong. Popular history of the numbered object type centering on the central, southern, and western parts of Asia and their carpetmaking traditions. I expected all the colonialism around Britain and the US, but was surprised by some of the other stories.
A Peculiar Combination and The Key to Deceit, by Ashley Weaver. First two in a WWII mystery series featuring a young female safecracker gone straight and the officer and gentleman who put her on that path as they deal with Nazi spies and the Battle of Britain. Engaging so far, with two interesting mysteries, and the romantic triangle the author is setting up is sufficiently subtle that it's not ruining the rest of the story.
A Case of Mice and Murder, by Sally Smith. First in a mystery series set in the Inner Temple of London at the turn of the last century featuring a clearly autistic-coded attorney. This one involves the dual mystery of the murder of the Lord Chief Justice and a case centering on who wrote a popular children's book. I'm in for the next one.
Breakout Year, by KD Casey. Queer baseball romance featuring fake dating and two Jewish characters with a complicated history. Light and fluffy when it's not dealing with heavy issues.
Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City, by Bench Ansfield. Now I know why the roof, the roof, the roof is on fire. Centering on the historic burning of the Bronx in the 1970s and extending out from there, this is economic history about the insurance industry and the financialization of, well, everything. Definitely worth your time if current events and economic history are your thing.

Movies & TV
The Hobby: Tales from the Tabletop. Watched this short documentary about boardgames on a plane flight. It's all about the subculture around them, which I'm personally not involved in but a lot of my friends are, so I was prepared to like the character types involved. I'm not sure how it would hold up in terms of background material if you didn't already know a little bit about board games.

Current Music: McStabby the Roomba

marycatelli posting in

girlgenius_lair

Oh. OH NO.

xoagray

So I was just thinking. We haven't found any definitive proof that there's any other life in the universe.

We're also limited by the speed of light. We can only see out into space via the electromagnetic spectrum. And every wave in that is also limited to the speed of light. Meaning from Infrared, to X ray, None of the light we can see via that means has traveled to us any faster than the speed of light.

This means that the vast majority of the stars we're seeing, and listening to with radio telescopes, we're seeing and hearing as they were millions or even billions of years ago.

We also know that radio waves (and lightwaves, but an extent) dissipate with distance. For example, the TV and Radio waves that have been transmitted from earth since say the 1930's or so have been traveling away form earth all this time, and are now our earliest transmissions are about 100 light years away. But, at that range, they're so diffuse that they'd be very difficult to pick up. Like if you had an old TV with a set of rabbit ears, you would still see mostly static. Meaning that even if transmissions from other worlds were out there in the Radio spectrum, the signal would probably be so weak we might not be able to pick it up.

So I'm thinking that any other species out there that has developed as far as we are, but hasn't developed FTL space travel is probably never going to hear from any other species unless they just happen to develop very close together, because light and radio communications are just not powerful enough to be used over any interstellar distance. Even just talking to Voyager 1 takes 24 hours for us and it's barely outside our solar system.

Further, any species advanced enough to have FTL travel is going to have to have developed communications that work at FTL speeds. And we're just now barely starting to fathom the most nascent concepts of what might possibly make that work. Like using quantum entanglement to send data, which we have done, but only just and in a very, VERY limited way.

Point here being that right now we probably don't even have anything like the technology to listen for interstellar communications between other species. So even if there are species all over the galaxy chatting back and forth, I'm thinking we just don't have anything like the tech needed to listen.

It's entirely possible we're the equivalent of someone trying to use a cup on a string to listen to someone else's cellphone conversation. No matter how hard we try, we just don't have the tech to hear.

Current Mood: curious
Current Location: Central Florida
Current Music: Fans whirring