Interstellar communication

However, the distances from Earth to other potentially inhabited systems introduce prohibitive delays, assuming the limitations of the speed of light.

The SETI project has for the past several decades been conducting a search for signals being transmitted by extraterrestrial life located outside the Solar System, primarily in the radio frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum.

An extremely simple message was aimed at a globular cluster of stars known as M13 in the Milky Way Galaxy and at a distance of 30,000 light years from the Solar System.

[1] While mail packets would likely be limited to speeds far below that of electromagnetic or other light-speed signals (resulting in very high latency), the amount of information that could be encoded in only a few tons of physical matter could more than make up for it in terms of average bandwidth.

Starting in 1979, Robert Freitas advanced arguments[1] [2] [3] for the proposition that physical space-probes provide a superior mode of interstellar communication to radio signals, then undertook telescopic searches for such probes in 1979[4] and 1982.