Reaching the stars

I doubt that I will ever go into space, no matter how cheap flights in the Bezos dong rocket and its successors may eventually become.  But it has occurred to me that I may someday reach the stars.

In some areas of the world, internet access is delivered via satellite, and the infrastructure for doing this is expanding rapidly, with thousands of new satellites planned for the end of 2022.  This means that pretty much everything on the internet will be beamed out into space, toward satellites which will re-direct the signal back to customers on Earth.  Since radio waves aimed at a satellite also continue on into the void beyond, this means that eventually the whole internet will be streaming out into the cosmos.

I don't know how far such signals can travel before weakening to the point of being drowned out by the cosmic background radiation.  But they will never entirely disappear, and even at interstellar distances, it's conceivable that a civilization with sufficiently advanced technology might be able to extract the faint signal from the noise -- and see our internet in all its glory.

I have never expected to have any sort of monument, of course.  But I feel it would be a fine thing if one day, long after I am gone, some unimaginable alien being in a distant solar system were to decipher and read one of my blog posts, and be offended by it.