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

Yes, but not at the range of thousands of miles. You can use large (3-4 meter wide) parabolic dishes to focus the sound waves to a point. They’re called [Acoustic Mirrors](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_mirror) they had a range of about 35 kilometers. You can also buy a parabolic microphone, those can pick up sounds up to 2.5 kilometers away.