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Ok, I'll bite:

Please don't reach for the Tinfoil just yet!

In general I support the SETI Project, because it actually runs on a cheap budget while sincerely working on looking for ET signals. And in the radio spectrum, I'm betting that someday we'll find something that'll knock our socks off.

However, having said the above, I think Shostak is blinded by his crusade and too close association to Carl Sagan and his expectation of how alien life should be characterized. Both men have espoused that alien life will be so different that we will have a hard time recognizing it, and that its technology will challenge us too greatly. This view leads folks down the path that we are so very backward technologically that finding signals will be very hard and, in addition, we certainly aren't being visited by anyone. "Even at the speed of light interstellar travel is too slow..." that sort of thing.

There have been some very recent advances in technology here on Earth that have shown that practical teleportation of light (and hence, information) has been achieved. Why is this important? Two things:

1. Faster-than-Light communication is achievable. The galaxy just got a lot smaller.
2. We humans, y'know, we primatives in the universe, have found this technology and are ably poised to exploit it.

Those two factors show that Shostak's view is biased and ultimately flawed. He and and the other SETI "priests" think the only way to communicate is via slow radio waves, so any chance of galactic travel or community is pretty much impossible. I take a contrary view: Radio is a phenomenon that is found in nature, and all technological species stumble upon it and use it for remote communication to start out. Perhaps the next step is to devise an artificial but much more useful transmission technique that is faster than radio. The upshot of this stuff is that the real communication in the universe may actually be happening with this "next-step" technology. When we begin using such techniques ourselves, we may find we're on a galactic "party-lne".

Alright y'all, I promised no tinfoil required, so hang with me here on the next point, then I'll go back to conservative political stuff. There has been another breakthrough in technology as of late, through the virtual creation of matter. Artificial atoms, if you will, used to control incredibly small computer circuits. The application beyond electronics, however, may not be apparent to you. Basically, to create the artificial atoms, the researchers had to have information available to describe the atoms. If you join this idea with the transporter technology I described above, the implications are that there may be a "Star-Trek-Scotty-Type" in reality sometime in the future. Commucating in and travelling around the cosmos doesn't appear to be nearly as impossible as SETI may have you thinking.

O-ooo. This subject is so rich for the flight of imagination. Why have not we contacted the aliens yet? Or more likely, why nobody contacted us? There can be a number of reasons. To expand on your example of faster-then-light communication. If it is indeed just a science-fiction and no faster-then-light communication or movement is possible, it would severe limit anybody ability to communicate through so long distance. Encouraging fact is that science taboos sometimes are proven wrong. Just a few centuries ago we did not know a small portion of what we know today. There indeed can be a litmus test for the young races to knock on the door of the Universal community, if any, to announce themselves. Similar to the warp-drive signature of the Star Trek Universe.

Discouraging fact, on another hand, is that even if ET do exist, what is a chance that our one century of technological advance out of billions years of the Universe existence brings us on the level where anybody is interested to meaningfully communicate; in any other way that we communicate with frogs by dissecting them?

Didn't mind your post at all, Frank_Discussion. I too, support SETI, and agree with your assessment about lack of willingness to consider other ways of thinking that certain fields of science gets itself wrapped up in, and I too am not wanting to sound "tin foilish" here, but, consider this other thread that is ongoing:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/586511/posts

Now, I don't want to go off on one of my Immanuel Velikovsky rants here, but one thing that was learned from the entire Velikovsky affair is how set in dogma some science can be, and at the time of the releasing of his "crackpot notions", the reponse to Velikovsky went beyond reason, and that attack was later spearheaded by Sagan, who even took shots at Velikovsky after he had died. What made all this worse, was that it was not Velikovsky's more outlandish sounding claims that seem to upset the scientists at the time, but rather items that we are now taking for scientific fact, such as the Earth's being struck by other bodies such as comets and asteroids at a far greater rate than was beleived in 1950, and that these bodies affected the world's history, including mankind's, even up into the era that we consider to be mankind's civilisation building period, ideas that were scientific heresy even up into the 1970's, for those notions challenged the Marxist underpinnings of that dogma.