Astronomers find no signs of alien tech after scanning over 10 million stars

CNET ^ | Sept. 7, 2020 8:36 p.m. PT | Jackson Ryan

[PJ-Comix]

According to Kilgore Trout, Space Aliens communicate by tap dancing and farting.

[SunkenCiv]

"But I am not really willing to accept your premise, because it may well be that the means of communications they have are of a kind that we do not know how to receive, and that they would not have the means of communicating with sufficiently powerful radio or optical signals. That is something which, technologically, is too difficult for them but they would have some other means we would not recognize." -- Thomas J. Gold, 'Communication with Extraterrestial Intelligence' (Sagan, ed)

"To consider the Earth as the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd as to assert that in an entire field of millet, only one grain will grow." -- Metrodorus, 4th c BC Greek philosopher

"Heaven and earth are large, yet in the whole of space they are but as a small grain of rice. How unreasonable it would be to suppose that, besides the heaven and earth which we can see, there are no other heavens and no other earths." -- Teng Mu, 13th c AD Chinese philosopher

[GreenLanternCorps]

[Svartalfiar]

As to radio waves - back to the 9 billion people, every little town around the world now has a radio or tv station, licensed or not, most broadcasting 24 hours. Not to mention ham radio broadcasts, podcasts and internet. Even remote areas of the world have satellite links. That’s a whole lot more white noise than existed in 1950, when tv stations went off the air at midnight, there was no internet and ham operators were few and far between. There’s a peak right behind me that we jokingly call an alien base it has so many microwave receivers/repeaters. And then there’s skylink, which will theoretically enable internet from any point on earth and will quadruple bandwidth use. And militaries around the world with their own dedicated bands. We are a lot noisier, and brighter now than ever before.

Are we though? Sure we're "noisier", but does that actually translate into actual noise in the galaxy? EMR power drops with the cube of the distance (if I remember correctly), so even the Aricebo signal is weaker than the galaxy's background radiation by now, and that has barely made it past part of our small arm of the Milky Way, much less the rest of the galaxy.

[sten]

even at a single light year away, what the hell would they expect to find?

unless they’re making MASSIVE ships, you won’t see them

a dyson sphere? ring world?

just seems over the top for what would be needed.

of course, maybe the evidence of their existence ... is us

[CardCarryingMember.VastRightWC]

Or a more pessimistic possibility:

• Radio waves only exist for a microscopically tiny window of time, because...
• Not many years after civilizations learn to use radio waves, they develop nuclear bombs, with the potential to wipe out all life on their planet (cockroaches excepted).
• Not long after they *think* they have the nuclear proliferation monster under control, they develop the internet.
• The internet's overall effect is to drive people apart, hating each other, going psycho.
• The combination of hundreds of millions of nut cases plus the nukes, obliterates the civilization and stops all the radio waves, about a century after they first started.