dfacto wrote:I think we can safely assume that interstellar signal detection is a non-issue in this story (as in, it doesn't exist) or else humans would have known about the rest of the factions long ago.
Actually they got somekind of signal in 1977, but it lasted only a couple of minutes, before earth rotation got it away and it was never get back.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal
And seti can only search of couple of frequences, because most of them are ful off noice from television, mobile phones, radars, home appliances like remote controlled carage door openers etc.
discord wrote:unless voyager was significantly outside pluto orbit when they did that test, the number you are looking for is probably over 5.7 MILLION times longer...you might have dropped a zero and some change somewhere along the line.
the solar system is only 7 light hours diameter....to pluto. 217 light YEARS is quite a bit longer
Distance to Pluto is 1/3 of distance to Voyager and distance to Voyager is 0.0018 light year (16.12 light hour), in current speed it was 0.00146 on 6 years ago. I did made some roundings, but it don't change the result very much.
So real distance 157.000 times longer.
So umiak can find us easily, if they have shipsize disk pointed on right direction and they are using different frequences than us in their communications & radars and listening right frequences.