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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I rather doubt I’ll be rocketing to Alpha Centauri to build my dream house. Singularity aside, it’s more than likely I’ll be part of mother earth’s compost heap.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

In addition, our shell of AM broadcasting, and even FM broadcasting, is only a century thick. Broadcasts now are shifting to digital formats.

* Television broadcasts are actually a multiplex of several data streams, each of which encapsulates a highly-compressed encoding of video or audio, which is incomprehensible until you know what the codec is.* The AM band is about to go, changing over to DRM (an unfortunate acronym clash; in this context it stands for Digital Radio Mondiale) in the coming decade. Shortwave is already moribund and is going DRM as well.* FM seems to be holding out; the UK tried and failed to popularise DAB. But that's more juicy spectrum for repurposing and they're going to keep trying.* Lots of music and television goes over the Internet now. Lots of it.

We have also changed codecs frequently as we come up with ones that better fit the constraint of limited bandwidth and the availability of a ridiculous surplus of CPU power.

So no, they might detect something in our direction with the spectrum of oddly-coloured noise.

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