ORIGINAL: wdolson
If you were traveling at the speed of light, time would essentially stop and you would hear nothing. Another way to look at it would be the radio waves would be traveling exactly the same speed you were.
If you were traveling a little less than the speed of light, you would pick up radio, but it would be stuff broadcast after you left (you would be going slower than the radio waves), but it would be dramatically downshifted in frequency to a point where you would probably need a computer to speed it back up again, and collecting an hour's worth of programming would take a few years.
If you were able to exceed the speed of light, with some kind of drive only known to science fiction today, you would outrun the radio and most likely hear nothing while you were traveling, but when you stopped, you would be able to pick up broadcasts from many years ago, depending on how far away you were. The radio waves would also be very diffuse, the strength of the signal declines at the cube of the distance (the signal is radiating out from Earth in a sphere), so you would need a super sophisticated receiver to be able to pick up anything. Radio noise put out by our sun would probably drown out much of the signal after some distance. You might be able to pick up a bit of a radio hot spot where Earth was when the broadcasts you are picking up were sent, but all you would be able to do is pick up that something was transmitted.
SETI tries to pick up coherent radio patterns in signals from other stars. So far they haven't found anything definitive. They do have some pretty sophisticated receiver arrays (and would like to build even more sophisticated arrays). I doubt you'd be able to pick up anything coherent with commercially available equipment even if planets around nearby stars were broadcasting.
And always remember 285,000 miles per second, it's not only a good idea, it's the law. [:D]
Bill
Bill,
I think you may be wrong about the speed of light, but not the radio lol A friend I grew up with (the guy who actually got me playing wargames such as Tobruk, Squad Leader, Luftwaffe, etc.) teaches at the University of Minn. Deluth. He has been working on a project involving neutrinos for about 20 years. If you seen the movie 2012, nuetrinos destroy the earth lol but at least the movie got the reciever deep in the ground in India correct. There are 2 recievers that my freind worked at, one buried deep in the Alps in Italy, and the other deep in some mountain in Japan. Anyway, these neutrinos pass thru the earth and never slow down, so the mountains act as a filter. I was in the Marines, so I won't pretend to know a whole lot about Astrophysics. But last year they fired nuetrinos from from some sort of generator to a receiver and they traveled faster than light. Then there was speculation about if Einstien was correct they would of had to of received the neutrinos before they were fired.
I'll include an article, and you can do your own research if you are interested.....it hurts my brain [&:]
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/opini ... das30.html
I'd rather be lucky than good.
