Astrophysicist suggests ‘radical mundanity’ is answer to the ‘great silence’ in the galaxy
If you had loud neighbors that were always yelling at each other, sometimes beating each other, and throwing trash all over their yard and the streets, I bet you’d stay away from them too.
And yet some of us humans are fascinated by ants.
Reminds me of this sci fi story in which these aliens contact us and they’re always bragging about how they have IQs of 300-400, and by the end of the story we learn that most of the aliens have IQs of 700-800 but only the less intelligent ones are tasked with us.
(I do not mean to imply that only less-intelligent humans are fascinated by ants)
I mean if they keep using methods we have no way of detecting then sure, why keep doing it? But if they’re capable of even knowing we’re here to even try to communicate with I’d have to guess that they’re also capable of telling what types of signals we could detect. We’ve never received any kind of signal that would make us think it wasn’t naturally occurring other than the “WOW” signal and even that turned out to not be aliens.
Fun fact: There have been at least two signals orders of magnitude stronger than the “wow” signal. I forgot the details, but IIRC, they’re both from different newer detectors made to look for dark matter.
The speed of light is far too slow for any potential alien to know we are even here. An alien 50 light years out that detected Hitler’s Olympic address (send in 1936 one of the first strong signals, intentional sending didn’t come until latter) still hasn’t got their response back to us yet! Even if there are aliens, there are only around 2000 stars at that distance and so odds are against them being that closer.
that is before we start talking about how signals lose strength of distance. Most of the stars we see in the sky are in the same sub-arm of the spiral arm of the milky way that we are in - even stars don’t have enough energy to reach earth from farther out! (telescopes of course can detect a lot more, but still we are talking about star level energy here). I don’t know what the limits of detecting life on earth are, but I doubt even the most sensitive possible systems could have detected dinosaurs from the nearest star to us (excluding our sun). TV (that is strong signals but not directed) is detectable farther out, but even still we don’t gets much farther. As the world moves to low power digital communications there is less to detect. There are of course intentional “we are here” messages sent via directional radio telescope - but they are rely on our best guess of where aliens might be and so could miss a lot, and still those only reach so far - and have not gone very far.
Then there’s the whole Dark Forest hypothesis.
