No idea where to put this. Sci-fi nerds! Help me out!

[Gremlin]

So, Vulcan is about 16 light years from Earth. Yet we didn't make contact with them until 2063, the year we invented warp travel. So why didn't we get their radio signals 16 years after they invented radio communications on their planet? I ask because I'm planning a science fiction RPG that's heavily influenced by Star Trek (and Firefly), and I'm trying to figure out where the aliens are and I'd like them to be closer than 200 lightyears away because that's pretty darn far, but still plausible given we haven't heard anything from outer space yet.

[Torch]

Because they listen to music via Vulcan mind-melds perhaps? 

[The Phantom Eyebrow]

Well now, this isn't my area of expertise by any means, but I understand that radio signals decay over distance.  If Vulcan is 16 light years away from Earth then this equates to 1.514E17 metres (just under 100,000,000,000,000 miles by my tired mental arithmetic).  It'd be quite difficult (impossible perhaps?) to pick out whatever trace remnants of this signal reached us from the background radiation. 

[stumpy]

As TPE notes, the signal would be very weak from a radio source 16 light years away. In addition, and people forget this all the time, analog radio signals have only been used on Earth for a hundred years or so and will probably be gone in the next couple of decades. Those are signals that are relatively easy to pick up and recognize as caused by intelligent life, as opposed to the tons of background radio frequency noise caused by 'natural' (non-sentient) phenomena. Digital signals can look very much like background noise and are difficult to recognize as anything else without knowing how they were encoded.

For example, if you built a device for amplifying radio signals and sending them to a speaker (which is what a radio is, but you might have any number of devices that do that for some other purpose) and picked up on an analog radio signal of someone talking, even in another language, you might easily tell that it is deliberate communication. But if you were to do the same for a digital signals, the raw signals themselves would sound like noise on a speaker. And, they wouldn't necessarily sound any different on a digital receiver, unless it was built to decode that exact transmission protocol. It would be like listening to a (digital) cell phone signal on a scanner; it doesn't really sound like anything.

So, if their technological history was anything like ours, the Vulcans probably would have used analog radio for a while and then went to a digital system. But, even if any of those analog transmissions were strong enough to reach us, they easily could have made the switch to digital well before we were looking to space for signs of intelligent life. For example, they might have invented radio before we did, or they might have had analog radio from 1900 to 1920 and then decided it was more logical to use digital from then on. Their last analog signal might have passed us in 1936, well before we were paying attention.

[thalaw2]

Perhaps if people put on tin foil hats they can pick up the signals much better and learn to love Vulcan Opera.

[stumpy]

Perhaps if people put on tin foil hats they can pick up the signals much better and learn to love Vulcan Opera.

I hear they put on an thralling 27-hour performance (reform version) called the "The Logic Of Love / The Love Of Logic" with Knuth's Fundamental Algorithms as the libretto. 

[daglob]

Blankety-blank software ate my message

Anyway, I can't quote the episode, but I think it was Deep Space 9 where it was mentioned that humans went from powered flight to atomic power in years, instead of centuries like everybody else (and I think a similar observation was made on B5). While most of the races (notably excluding the Organians) are pretty well as advanced as humanity as of Star Trek (the original series), they may have quit using analog radio long before we invented the alphabet.

AM radio has a hard time making its way out of the atmosphere, much less far out into space. FM and TV broadcasts have the potential to make it s far as another solar system (see the book and movie Contact. I don't think Carl Sabgan was the first to use the Hitler TV broadcast as an invatation to aliens to come see us). However, since they are so advanced, maybe the aliens have developed ways to communicate that do not allow all that energy leakage into the environment (yes, the Vulcans have cable).

Other races may be waiting for those interesting primates on that third planet around that small yellow star to "stew" for another thousand or so years, until they develop language or something, before they come around and check in on us. Won't they be surprised.

Check out the known space series by Larry Niven, and Startide Rising by David Brinn.

I also am given to understand that Vulcan opera can't hold a candle to Klingon opera when it comes to sheer excruciating pain.

[Torch]

Perhaps if people put on tin foil hats they can pick up the signals much better and learn to love Vulcan Opera.

Bring on the Vulcan Opera!

La La La La La La La! 

[Gremlin]

Anyway, I can't quote the episode, but I think it was Deep Space 9 where it was mentioned that humans went from powered flight to atomic power in years, instead of centuries like everybody else (and I think a similar observation was made on B5). While most of the races (notably excluding the Organians) are pretty well as advanced as humanity as of Star Trek (the original series), they may have quit using analog radio long before we invented the alphabet.

[...]

Other races may be waiting for those interesting primates on that third planet around that small yellow star to "stew" for another thousand or so years, until they develop language or something, before they come around and check in on us. Won't they be surprised.

Well, my biggest issue with that is that humans aren't necessarily the new kids on the block here. This is for an RPG, kind of a cross between Firefly, Star Trek, and smidgeons of Stargate and Asimov's robot stories thrown in. The only race that's had FTL for thousands of years is long dead, having seeded parts of the galaxy with protohominid DNA "seedcodes." All the near-human species developed at approximately the same rate. In fact, most of them didn't bother with FTL because Earth is pretty much the only planet without any neighbors in the same solar system. Terrans are remarkably technologically advanced, and tend to use that to their advantage; the homind-centric alliance relies heavily on giving obscenely powerful technology to "under-developed" civilizations to bolster their forces and expand their borders.

Although I COULD hypothetically use that for the further alien races, the ones that aren't connected to hominids at all (hominid is a terrible term, since one race is a kind of dinosaur thing that evolved on a planet where mammals never got a foothold, but still.)

[daglob]

The "progenetors" idea is a good basis for having extreme tech around (a little or a lot) that nobody understands, but it works so...

Good games can be had looking for saleable tech. Good games can be had looking for ways to defeat the extreme tech. Or the extreme tech could be the way the PVCs get around (Blake's 7).

It also means that you can have 'deux ex machina's whenever you need them: mystery devices that work when they need to but not when you want them to (can you say "sentient weapon"?)