Other civilizations may be using pre-radio or post-radio technology.

We've only been using radios since 1904. So 110 years? That is nothing in the scope of millennia.

Other civilizations just may have looked at some JSP threads and concluded there is no intelligent life here worth contacting

Maybe we are receiving signals from space and we dont know it yet.

Our technology is relatively advanced.... relative to humans.

Maybe we aren't receiving signals because there is nothing sending signals.

Maybe aliens want to contact us but dont know how.

Maybe aliens are getting ready to take over our planet and dont want to send us signals because that might ruin the element of surprise.

Someone once told me there arent stupid questions, only stupid people to ask them.



most likely this

This post was edited by Bloop on Sep 16 2014 10:48am

Brnv and dro arguing over how much of the distant cosmos we see in terms of number of pixels...

Would be fine if either one of you used citations instead of insulting each other's English comprehension

Coming from the non physicists point of view, I don't see anything wrong with this

Simple 4 things to keep in mind:

1) Signal strength. We probably can't detect signals from life very far away, the signal is just weak. This limits the range we might detect stuff from.

2) Overlapping windows of time. How long is a civilisation capable of broadcasting signals for? A few hundred years between the time they invent radio and the time they become extinct, perhaps (this is unknown). And we have our own window of existence. The chance of these windows overlapping is miniscule.

3) We aren't listening very hard.

4) How common is extra-terestrial life anyway? We don't know, though perhaps not very common since we haven't found any yet.

I think we would be able to discern alien broadcasts from other, naturally occurring, radio sources. It's not hard to tell the difference between the two since we don't need to know what is being said, only that there is some intelligent signal there. The main issue is sparing enough telescope time and processor power to make the distinction.

There are probably some other points that I missed...

i understood exactly what brmv said in his first post, it's mind boggling that he needs to explain further.

This post was edited by hq78 on Sep 24 2014 01:01pm

We've only been using radios for about 100 years. for argument's sake, if an Extra terrestrial civilization only has a 1,000 year head start, they are going to have powerful tech that even we cannot decode or even sniff out yet. The theory being is that many far out galaxies that may contain life is most likely millions of years ahead of us in terms of technology.

you never give up

We did, it was called the "wow" signal.

stare through that telescope long enough and sooner or later smack dab in the middle of those *million/billion points of light you'll see a shadow puppet of a barking dog.
it's bark will be following about or around 185,000ish miles/second behind











*Thanks George Q.