[throwaway1X2]

While I cannot put a label on it right now (but surely it has a name, read about it somewhere), it is some kind of paradox that sufficiently advanced civilizations will broadcast themselves openly and detectably only for a very very tiny fraction of time (tens of years are nothing on intergalactic, interstellar or even planetary scale).

We quickly learned that blasting long-wave analog voice signals to the skies and expecting the reflection behind the horizon is pretty inefficient and moved to shorter, shorter and shorter waves. Not only you don't need to blast local radio stations in local language to the other side of the planet, having hundreds of computer wireless networks in one apartment building means that it actually shouldn't broadcast more than a few walls away in order for multiple networks to coexist even with time-division multiplexes and collision avoidance magic.

So, in about a hundred years, we discovered RF, we then started by blasting long-wave radio stations using ionosphere as a mirror, gradually moved to more and more local frequency bands, we then launched satellites to wirelessly ping across the ocean, only to hide the signals back under the sea and ground using fiber optics for practical reasons (bandwidth, latency), we went from analog to digital and we started encrypting just about everything. In the end, we will produce mostly random noise with ultrashort reach.

Next step - we will enclose Sol with Dyson sphere and disappear completely :)

[dogma1138]

It's not a paradox but it's based on our own techonlogical progression which is weird.

We are as a species 200-250,000 years old. For most of that time we did absolutely fucking nothing as it seems. Even for the recorded history which if we take the past 10,000 years then we still didn't made much progress as we did in the past 100. And the weird part is that we still have small pockets of population living like our ancestors 200K years ago.

In 100 years we went from horses to cars, to rockets and spaceships to the internet and computers small enough to fit in our pockets.

The 20th century was weird as fuck as far as scientific progression goes.