[wastedyears]

Call it stupidity or ignorance, but I fail to see how emissions not directly aimed at something, projected to a very fine point with incredible power behind it, won’t simply fuzz out into nothingness in a short distance (relatively speaking). We communicate with our probes because the math was done on their trajectories, so we have a good idea of where they are in space. Also, since it seems the heliosphere is actually a circular, real-thing in space, how would extraneous emissions reach distant solar systems if they aren’t directed?

[sima_yi]

The Forbin Project?

[slouper]

What a colossal waste of time, effort and money. This makes me sick and I’m a scientist.

[spokeshave]

I was at a start up company a while back and the interest was in looking for evidence of either:

1). Nuclear fallout

or

2) Atmospheric pollution

as evidence of advance civilization

[Brett66]

I like this approach much better, monitoring radio signals requires making huge assumptions about alien technology. It would only let us know about a civilization on the surface of a planet that uses energy, but that’s a much broader assumption of technological evidence than radio wave transmission.

We still would have no idea if alien dolphins with opposable thumbs are building cities in an ocean.