Radiotelescopes usefull?

Okay here's a question to everybody who knows something about radiotelescopes and glasfiber technology.

In these days more and more telephone and data communication relies on glasfiber technology. Because glasfiber technology uses light the signal travels faster.

I was thinking, if light travels so much faster than sound, why in the world are people using radiotelescopes to seek for intelligent forms of life?

Usually when radiotelescopes are being used to seek alien life, people are doing that because they think alien life forms will base their communications on radio waves.

Personally I think it would be smarter to use light (combined with beacons to curve the light) to transfer datastreams. How do you guys feel about that? And do you feel we should be looking for light instaed of radio?

Vampguard.

Radio waves travel at or near the speed of light. You're thinking of Acoustic waves which travel at the maximum limit of the medium it's travelling through.. like an atmosphere. It's why they say there is no sound in space as there is no medium for the Acoustic waves to travel. Radio waves are much different. The fact that we use it to talk over long distances means little we can do that with a number of other frequencies it's just Radio was one of the first frequencies to be exploited.

As sardion2000 said, radio waves are a form of light. Humans can only see a VERY small portion of light, what's called the visible spectrum. There's much more too it though, as you can see below.



So even the radio you listen to in your car or at home is being sent through the air in a form of light energy that we just cannot see.

EDIT: Whoa, that was a bold post I made!

[edit on 10/28/2005 by cmdrkeenkid]

Also, If an advanced race is also seeking contact they would use the lowest common denominator to cast as wide a net as possible, as it were. That would mean to "communicate" (discover) with "lower" species they would use what we have at our hands...radio waves.

Thank you! This defenitly explains a lot.