| There’s a few problems when hunting for life: Distances are immense: 1. Our view of the galaxy is very limited. We know almost nothing about our closest neighbouring solar system, let alone anything further afield 2. And because the distances are so far, we are effectively seeing those distant events hundreds or thousands of years in the past. 3. Where to look? We cannot search everywhere. We can only hope to get lucky that we are searching the right corner of the sky at the right time. Alien life is completely alien: 4. We can only make assumptions of what to look for. Any sufficiently encrypted signal might genuinely appear like white noise to us. They might be so advanced that we simply cannot detect them 5. Early communication systems on Earth were noisy in that they were broadcast 365 degrees. Later systems could be targeted, focused in a specific direction. As technology advances, noisy classical methods of broadcasting become less common. This in turn reduces the amount of noisy any extraterrestrial eavesdropper could spot. And that’s assuming they’re not intentionally “cloaking” themselves. Putting aside Star Trek style fantasy for a moment, there is an advantage to remaining hidden. Whether you’re a predator like a burrowing spider or stealth bomber, or prey like bugs that camouflage themselves as plants; being hidden gives you a massive tactical advantage. |