I understand that sound waves essentially stretch and disperse very quickly, but technically, aren’t the very tiny sound waves still there, thousands of miles away?

Question

Could very very sensitive instruments pick up on sounds that happened far away?

In: 9

Answer 1

Inverse square law, double the distance, halve the volume of the sound. Eventually the kinetic energy of the sound, which is moving the particles of air, will have transferred all of its kinetic energy to its surroundings and it will then cease to exist as a sound.