[Atmob-discuss] FW: Silent Sky - A Thought Experiment

[mcb, inc.]

On Wed, 28 May 2008, astronut at morlock.net wrote:

> This is pondering from one of the engineers that works
> for me at foliage.com.  I thought you folks might be
> interested in his mental exercise...

Well, since we're not discussing r^2 signal loss and 1000 years
at the source will still be 1000 years at Earth, I'll ignore (4).
With uniformly distributed start dates, the calculation is simple
for best and worst cases:  we just need to exclude a listening
window.  For a 100 year radiator:

 	((9e9 - 1100)/9e9) ^ 1000000 or ~88.5% chance of silence

For a 1000 year radiator:

 	((9e9 - 2000)/9e9) ^ 1000000 or ~80.1% chance of silence

Those are the upper and lower bounds.  1000-year case goes to
about 50% at 3.15M civs.

--
Monty Brandenberg, Software Engineer                               MCB, Inc.
mcbinc at panix.com                                             P.O. Box 426188
mcbinc at pobox.com                                   Cambridge, MA  02142-0021
617.864.6907