If you take a look at the abstract you’ll see that’s not what they’re doing at all. Rather, they’re looking not at the entirety of the universe, nor even at the entirety of the known universe, but at that part of the universe radio telescopes would have a shot at detecting ETI if they could examine all of it. But they haven’t examined all of it; they’ve examined a “hot tub’s” worth. Give them some credit. These guys are professional astronomers and do know a thing or two about mathematics.
No, I am not going to give these guys credit. Stating they have barely begun looking at the universe for other life forms is the logical equivalent of stating the sky is blue or the moon revolves around the sun. It is such a basic fact as far as our knowledge of what is in the universe as to be an irrelevant title. However, such basic ‘research’ or better yet, such basic writing about research is what passes for scientific exploration in today’s dumbed down society.
Stephan Hawking wrote in his book A Brief Moment in Time that he was advised the number of books he would sell would be inversely proportional to the number of equations he had in the book. So, he added only one equation, E=MC2. I find this fact a sad reality of our scientific studies of today and that is the comment I was making before.
JoMa