My God! It's Full of Stars!

ok so I re read all the comments and it would seem that we both took each other the wrong way! "I apologise for my rather rude comments", but please understand, I meant no disrespect and I was only kidding around, I didn't realize that what I said could be considered "snotty" or insulting, I didn't actually mean it in that sort of context! I understood completely what you were saying and I understand or agree that incredible distances prevent any sort of timely communications, this would be why SETI lost most of it funding . I guess, I got a bit offended by your comment about "magic particles" or "gee whizz wouldn't it be nice" comment, as if to imply my comment was a waste of time and or completely stupid! if it were a waste of time, then you wouldn't have bothered, right? we are in this day and age realizing some pretty incredible facts in regards to science and physics, the experiment I was talking about "entanglement" is that of which Einstein referred to as "spooky science", it defies our current understanding of quantum physics and is literally one of those discoveries that promise to change technology as we know it! when we separate 2 particles from their constituents we have an quark and an anti quark, normally when we begin to separate the two we see a "gluon field forms a narrow tube (or string)" between them, the more energy we put in the longer the tube but with no measurable increase in energy by the gluon field, instead with enough energy more quarks and anti-quarks will appear in this field, so the energy we put in to separate eventually goes to create new particles! if this is not "weird enough" then this part will floor you! physicists have figured out a way to separate a quark and an anti quark without new quarks and anti-quark pairs being created, if they change conditions in the quark, such as make it vibrate or resonate at a certain frequency, the exact same thing happens to the anti quark! no matter the distance and with zero latency! currently this experiment was performed with something like a hundred miles between the two and an expected and quite measurable amount of time should elapse between the two, even at the speed of light! but it is instantaneous, there is no latency! the theory is that there could be thousands of light years between the two and it would still be no latency! so, does this prove their are forces in the universe that are in fact faster than light? or could it be possible these two particles can exist in the same place in time and space simultaneously? this experiment suggests there is some sort of connection between the two particles, this is what physicists ponder today!

I don't know, but this will never be used to power a spaceship in your lifetime and probably not in your children's.

I thought quark was the noise a posh duck made.

of course not! I never claimed it would! physically traveling to another star is beyond our current understanding of physics. it would take thousands of years to even get to our closest neighbouring star, even if we could travel at the speed of light your talking decades! and achieving such velocities would take hundreds of years of acceleration at extremely high gravitational forces, short of borrowing an "inertial dampener" from the star ship Enterprise, we are not going anywhere soon lol.

I agree. Just to be clear, though, don't say "at the speed of light" because we cannot ever accelerate to that speed. At the speed of light, it would take 4.3 years to reach Alpha Centauri and less than a dozen years to reach several other stars.

No you didn't take Setanta the wrong way.

not sure I understand? I honestly didn't mean anything by my comment "put that in yer pipe and..."

Finn is just hoping to start some trouble. My advice is not to play, but that's up to you.

Some years ago astronomers beamed a burst of radio waves into space (presumably from a radio telescope) to act as a "beacon" revealing our presence to anybody out there. I don't remember the name of the project or the exact details except it was said that "the earth became the brightest object in the galaxy in terms of radio emissions".
So that burst of energy is still flying out there and might yet be picked up.

In a million years time.

Radio waves presumably travel at the speed of light, and as the "energy burst" project took place at least 10 years ago it hit Alpha Centauri 6 years ago and is now much further out among the nearer stars.
I'll google around for more info on the width of the burst, I think it was only a very narrow concentrated cone aimed at a certain spot in the sky.

Incidentally a possible ET signal was received on Earth in 1977 but the jury is still out on whether it was really of alien origin-

Nicknamed the “Wow!” signal, this was a brief burst of radio waves detected by astronomer Jerry Ehman who was working on a SETI project at the Big Ear radio telescope, Ohio. The signal was, in fact, so remarkable that Ehman circled it on the computer printout, writing “Wow!” in the margin — and unintentionally giving the received radio signal the name under which it would become famous.
http://news.discovery.com/space/alien-life-exoplanets/the-wow-signal-130524.htm

Maybe radio is obsolete because there's something much better and we just don't know it yet.

I vote for that explanation.

If technological intelligence is at all common in the universe, then I would expect we would be detecting more (or at least "some") signals out there... unless radio is a short-lived technological solution to communications.

Like I mentioned earlier, perhaps telepathy is an advanced form of communication because perhaps the speed of thought is instantaneous?
Perhaps aliens are constantly sending telepathic messages to us, but our brains aren't tuned into them?
Perhaps sometimes a message does arrive in a human brain but can't be unscrambled, so the person hallucinates and thinks he's having a UFO close encounter of some sort..

Can you cite a scientific study to lend credence to this idea?

Not a sausage mate, it's just open-minded speculation for fun.
There are numerous accounts of human-to-human telepathy or a 'psychic link', so perhaps alien-to-human telepathy is also a possibility..

Could you tell me, then, why no one has set up a commercial service based on using telepathy to provide instantaneous communication to remote areas where the internet and cell networks aren't much available? I'll bet the news services, for instance, would pay good money for mobile communications with those areas? If it weren't reliable enough, such a service provider could use two or three psychics to send/receive, and use some kind of error checking to combine their information?

Unfortunately, "Telepathy" is undefined. You might as well say "perhaps magic is an advanced form of communication...". If you can narrow down what you think "Telepathy" might be into some aspect of real-world science, then it might be a more valuable conjecture.

Speculation is a valuable part of science because it explores new ideas, and without it scientific advance would grind to a halt and we'd still be flying around in Sopwith Pups..