[test6554]

Yes, if there's other life in the universe, then we absolutely don't want to announce our presence to it. Due to exponential growth in technology and the old age of the universe, we are the plankton of the universe and they are likely the fish.

[jerf]

I used to worry about that a bit when we discussed this a year or two ago, but then I realized that Earth has been broadcasting the fact that it is inhabited to any civilization only slightly more sophisticated than ours (like, literally only by a couple of years) who can see spectroscopy of our atmosphere when we transit in front of the Sun. Earth has been broadcasting that it has free oxygen for nearly two and a half billion years and we have no evidence of any attack.

[magduf]

>Earth has been broadcasting that it has free oxygen for nearly two and a half billion years and we have no evidence of any attack.

Have you forgotten about the K-T event? :-)

The dinosaurs learned the hard way the danger of not having a significant space program. It seems we're not doing that much better.

[jerf]

I run on the theory that if an alien civilization intended to destroy Earth, they would have succeeded. An alien civilization that reaches out once every few dozen million years years to sorta kinda whack the Earth seems about as likely as aliens hopping in their FTL spaceships and traveling the vast distances across the cosmos to our primitive little dirt ball, only to constantly crash into mountains located near secret military bases.

[lolc]

That analogy doesn't work for me. Why would somebody that can cross space stop by us? They don't need to eat exactly, do they?

[Semiapies]

Or put more generally, "Why would they care?" We'd have nothing a vastly more advanced civilization would particularly want from us, and we'd pose absolutely no threat to them.

If they are crazy genocidal monsters wiping out all intelligent life besides their own, then they're probably systematically looking for targets, sending out their own probes to check out any planet that could sustain life. If they have any kind of presence in Alpha Centauri that could detect these probes, then they'd be here soon enough even if we didn't send out a probe.