Physics 2083 - Study Guide #4
Updated through Wednesday, May 5.
Current study questions can be found
here.
- (145)
- Explain why the number of intelligent, communicative civilizations in our galaxy (the "N" of the Drake equation) depends on L, the average lifetime of an intelligent civilization.
- (146)
- Why do we think that searching for and communicating via radio signals is a more effective way to find out about the possibility of extraterrestrial life as opposed to actually visiting other stellar systems (you don't need to go through all the math, just summarize the reason).
- (147)
- Explain the concept of bandwidth in broadcasting. How does the bandwidth of a signal correlate with the amount of energy it takes to broadcast the signal? How does it correlate with the number of possible channels one would have to search to find the signal?
- (148)
- Explain the tradeoff an observer must make between sensitivity and sky coverage when trying to detect signals. If an observer takes the time to observe with very high sensitivity in a given direction, how does that affect the amount of time it will take to cover the whole sky?