It saddens me to think about communicating with technological cultures elsewhere in the universe. Suppose we knew that there was a technological culture on a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri (star nearest to us) circa 4.25 light years away & they knew about our technological culture. Our orbital speed is circa 66,600 miles per hour & a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri is likely to have a similar orbital speed. Any signal which degraded via an inverse square law would be too weak to detect. Any direct signal which did not degrade would be likely to miss the other planet and would surely miss a detector on the other planet. The best possibility for communicating might be a very large device like a Venetian-blind orbiting Sol & controllable from Earth. The plane of it orbit would have to be close to a plane including the planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. Does anyone have thoughts relating to the above or other ideas for communicating? The above seems more likely to be successful than the SETI-like signals. Communicating with planets further than 10 light years away seem impossible with current technologies.
