THE BEACON
The Tremendous Pulse: The Energy Cost of the Chi Sagittarii Beacon
In this critique of human scientific oversight, Reptiliandude reflects on the famous “Wow! signal” (the beacon) and the sheer scale of the energy required to transmit it across the cosmos. He suggests that humanity has focused too much on the signal’s content and not enough on the catastrophic physics of its origin in the Chi Sagittarii star group. To project such a powerful, focused signal across interstellar distances, a civilization would have to harness an amount of energy so vast that localized “city-wide blackouts” would be a trivial consequence compared to the total atmospheric or planetary strain.
THE BEACON
The Tremendous Pulse: The Energy Cost of the Chi Sagittarii Beacon
In this critique of human scientific oversight, Reptiliandude reflects on the famous “Wow! signal” (the beacon) and the sheer scale of the energy required to transmit it across the cosmos. He suggests that humanity has focused too much on the signal’s content and not enough on the catastrophic physics of its origin in the Chi Sagittarii star group. To project such a powerful, focused signal across interstellar distances, a civilization would have to harness an amount of energy so vast that localized “city-wide blackouts” would be a trivial consequence compared to the total atmospheric or planetary strain.
Image: This image is a screenshot from a thread titled “Wow! Signal – questions” on the amateur astronomy forum Stargazers Lounge. In the forum discussion, members utilize digital sky surveys and the SIMBAD astronomical database to visually investigate the specific patch of sky from which the famous 1977 Wow! signal originated. The image centers on the fifth-magnitude star HIP 95865 (also known as HD 184013), located in the constellation Sagittarius. Because the Wow! signal was a transient radio burst that lacked a precisely pinpointed, visible host star at the time of its detection, forum users use this prominent amber-colored star as a visual anchor and geographic guidepost just south of the Chi Sagittarii stellar group to navigate the dense, grainy field of deep-space background noise (Photo by SIMBAD Astronomical Database via Stargazers Lounge)
Source: RD (via GT), "Space is vast. Where should we be looking for life?" r/reptiliandude, Reddit, (2016, July 14) https://reddit.com/r/reptiliandude/comments/4szd3k/space_is_vast_where_should_we_be_looking_for_life/
Reptiliandude: When you discovered the beacon, you failed to take into consideration the tremendous pulse required to send it from the Chi Sagittarii star group.
City wide blackouts would have been the least of any inhabited world’s problems.
