[PatrickHenry]

There is yet another proposed explanation for the negative SETI results, probably mentioned in an earlier post. (There seems an endless series of such explanations.) This one is that the use of radio (or any part of the EM spectrum) for communications is just a brief phase in a species' technological progress. After a while, they move up to using something else -- which we have yet to discover. So in effect, we're looking for the equivelant of smoke signals. We just don't know, really. It's every exciting to realize that we still have so much to learn.

[Physicist]

Here's another explanation for the lack of radio signals: "There's Always Room At The Bottom".

Once a species develops nanotechnology, the speed of civilization begins to increase, and the scale of action relevant to the civilization begins to decrease. Radio communication simply becomes irrelevant as the scale of civilization goes down towards the quantum scale, and beyond that, who can tell? Who needs to communicate with the other side of the world, or even the next block, when there's a subjectively expanding universe in a grain of sand?

The information processing nexus called the industrial economy has become merged, at a cellular level, with the information processing nexus we call nature. Storm fronts of meshed intelligence ripple through the living fabric of the world...

[UnChained]

The Fermi Paradox refers to the absence of visits from extraterrestrials. "If beings exist they would be here by now" goes the thinking.


Some possible explanations for the lack of visits are:

*No one else exists.

*Interstellar travel is inherently impractical

*or... Every sentient race eventually develops replicators and holodecks and no further progress is made on any front