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by sliken 1080 days ago
Not sure I buy the "we are special/early" explanation.

However I don't think it makes sense for any civilization to be 'loud'. Just seems naive to blunder about and risk your civilization. However monitoring new civilizations for intelligence, fairness, open mindedness, lack of religions that justify killing outside their religion or species, treating the less fortunate of their/other species well and the like. Then once they hit some developmental milestones for compatible civilizations you introduce yourselves. Possible milestones include practical fusion, returning your ecosystem to baseline, practical anti-matter production/use, making a blackhole, traveling to the nearest star that you don't orbit, quantum computing at scale, etc.

Might well be something on the moon, well stealthed, a few meters down, with receivers capable of decryption RF traffic, and sensors to see how quickly we are poisoning ourselves.

If you think about it, if you were an alien watching earth, would you want to meet us? Or terminate us, at least the humans, and wait for something else intelligent to appear.