ELI5: Why is the sound quality of AM radio so much worse than that of FM radio?

Not to be a downer, but the idea of aliens picking up any of our day-to-day radio transmissions is pretty overblown. Radio signals get exponentially weaker the farther you go from the source because of the inverse square law.

Basically, you can imagine a radio transmission as an expanding sphere that expands outwards from the source at the speed of light. The energy from the transmission is spread out over the surface area of the sphere, so as the sphere gets larger the energy at any given point on the sphere gets smaller. (The signal gets "weaker".)

It doesn't take long for a normal radio signal to get overwhelmed by noise from natural sources of radiation - stars and cosmic microwave background radiation are big sources. Once a signal is overwhelmed by noise, that signal is just gone. Trying to tune into it would be like trying to listen to a conversation on the other side of the planet. IIRC, our radio and TV broadcasts don't even make it to Alpha Centauri before this happens.

That's not to say we couldn't communicate with aliens - a directed radio broadcast (say, with a laser) towards a specific point could go much farther since the signal's energy wouldn't be as spread out. You can also go farther by increasing the power - imagine some super-advanced civilization building a Dyson sphere and using all the power to transmit a signal.

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