Today [Jun 3] from governmental sources in Kazakhstan we have heard that real goes motion a pole and beside us unrolled program of preparation to natural disasters.
Sounds like the aliens are already here...
[laughs] I saw that, too.
I assume that's high-level,
NSA code talk...
(For real double-talk,
however, nothing beats their
date "explanation." [?!]
According to Fred Hoyle--and the bet my money is riding on--they are, and we is them. By Fred's lights, all the life in the universe is related through cross-pollination since the git-go--the later models seeded deliberately by their spacetraveling relatives. There are a couple of reasons we might well not detect a geometrically expanding run on resources by alien technical civilizations.
One is that the DNA structure of beings capable of sustaining technical civilizations runs it's course well before the universe can be consumed:
Being so good at existing that you don't have predators to sharpen up the gene pool strikes me as a pretty risky long term bet.
At any rate, speaking of poor bets, it's a poor bet that because we don't detect aliens selling swamp land to each other to drain, and shopping like maniacs at Bimart, that they therefore aren't around. Compare a palm pilot to a secretary and a receptionist, and a front office. Compare that to a temple full of expensive sacred priests who carefully guard the secret of the henscratchings by which they predict the floods and measure out acreage and tithings and calender events. It's a reasonably good bet that advanced civilizations deal more and more in knowledge and less and less in bulk consumables, and might be darn difficult to notice, even if they were zipping around on joyrides in our local neighborhood in droves.
Another option is that, being of sound DNA stock, we and our local environs represent a substantial investment, which is protected from tampering by property rights. Maybe more than one investment, and more than one set of property rights.