h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I really enjoyed this.

Couple of typos?

Waterhole
<> should this be Due to...

Wow! Now What?

Para beginning The Classic...
<> - was this meant to be outrages or outages?

Well done

'Due of' we'll get that fixed.

'outrages', on the other hand, was deliberate.

Glad you enjoyed this, thanks

I read this article in "upcoming entries" (which by the way seems to have disappeared from the front page) and found it very interesting.

I have now signed up for SETI@home and already have 200+ credit points - I notice that the data "I" am analysing is dated year 2000, so I hope we can get a few more people signing up and crunching these numbers to bring us up to date - imagine the embarrasment of finding intelligent life and haveing to answer a message six years after it was sent !

'Due of' fixed. Thanks for spotting this!

No Problem

Six years after? Depending on who sent the message [I mean from where] who knows how many years after? I love the whole SETI thing; I'm certain that LIFE is out there in THE UNIVERSE and EVERYTHING but I have a nagging doubt about whether anyone could hear them. Maybe someone who's good at math could help me. Calculate the number of photons created by the home sun of our hoped for friends and then the percentage of those bits [indivisible, remember its QM here] that get through all the murk to reach us. How big would a radio transmitter have to be to have the same percentage of its energy be large enough to twig our receivers? Put another way, if you can't even see the planet [albedo spread across many frequencies] in the glare of its sun, then how can you hear anything from the planet? The heavens are LOUD, we're listening for a crickets chirp at a rock concert.