Is 21st-Century Technology Too Primitive to Detect Advanced Extraterrestrial Life?

Maybe it's considered rude to contact other civilizations...? But what would I know, I'm just a monkey man with a tool.....

Here we are with what we think are fancy wireless communications over the internet and air waves and the aliens are in reality using a super advanced version of posted letters through wormholes.

_{Jack - Teleportation of people, no that's whats used instead of going to the bathroom.}

They have probably found a way to communicate using "spooky action at a distance" to quote Einstein,or particle entanglement,which has no delay across the whole universe.It would also be intrinsically secure from curious eavesdroppers.

And yes,we are probably too primitive to understand it.Particles fluctuating all around us may be entangled with particles on the other side of the universe.The trick is to find the mate for the particles.We have much to learn.

I've thought about this ever since SETI started. Radio is barely a century old here on Earth, and surely we will have something different within a few more centuries. What are the chances that another civilization will be using it now?

And wouldn't the S/N ratio obscure any signals from light-years distant?

For one thing, it will be what they were using way back when, rather than now. And, however crude radio might be, it still travels at c. Maybe someday we'll hear the Klingon equivalent of Amos and Andy.

The rare coin episode....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=il9DNjYX2x4

Neutrinos are very difficult to detect as are gravitational waves. Why would aliens use something to communicate that is that inefficient? If they exist, they have to deal with the same laws of science that we do.

Why should they broadcast signals in all direction with radio waves. Perhaps they have fiber to their houses and WiFi.

In any case, any transmission that we might intercept would most likely be unintelligible. We share the same planet with Cetaceans and we don't have a clue about what they are talking about.

The question of whether we are alone in the universe has only two answers --- "No", or "We don't know". The probability of life is a very small but unknown number. The number of inhabitable planets is a large but unknown number. We don't have enough data to guess what their product is.

Neutrinos and gravity waves are hard for us to detect; it might be child's play for an advanced civilization. And there are surely sciences we can't even dream of yet. We hypothesize stuff like dark energy and dark matter to explain observations we can't otherwise explain. These "placeholders" might exist and aliens might use them to communicate. And advanced communications might be beamed somehow only to the intended recipient, and encrypted or so foreign that it looks like random noise to us.

I'd sure like to hear from some aliens, but I think we are more likely to find life off the Earth by robotic exploration and space telescopes.

'....any transmission that we might intercept would most likely be unintelligible. We share the same planet with Cetaceans and we don't have a clue about what they are talking about.....'

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There is a difference between understanding that something is a message and understanding the message. You understand that cetaceans are talking without knowing what is being communicated. Detecting a message would be a huge revelation even without understanding the message.

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'....The question of whether we are alone in the universe has only two answers --- "No", or "We don't know".....'

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Actually the only two answers that can be made with certainty are "Unknown/We don't know" or "Yes". "Unknown" is where we are currently. Discovery brings us to "Yes". Nothing, short of developing omniscience, brings us to "No".

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'....The probability of life is a very small...number.'

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Why would you think that? The probability of life occurring was 100% for every planet you have ever set foot upon, and similarly 100% for every solar system which you have been to.

It isn't that surprising that we haven't been able to detect other civilizations, even if other civilizations are abundant.

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Think for a moment about Voyager 1. It is currently a little over 11.7 Billion miles from Earth. At that distance, even with signals intentionally directed at known locations, communication is slow and reliability is not great. Essentially, we can just barely communicate at that distance.

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The nearest Earth-like planet might be 6 light years away. For reference Voyager 1 is about 0.002 light years away. So the nearest Earth-like planet is roughly 3000 times more distant than Voyager.

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If the strength of a signal drops with with the square of the distance then that puts a signal originating from 6 light years away at a 9 million to 1 disadvantage compared to a similar signal originating at the distance of Voyager 1.

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Sure, stronger signals might originate from a thriving alien civilization, but 9 million times stronger? Also they are unlikely to have the advantage of knowing where to direct the signal, and we certainly don't know exactly where to listen.

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Assuming a similar coming of age process for alien civilization as those on earth, once the yahoo years of cheap energy accelerating technology at breakneck speeds to the point communication might become distantly detectable, there is likely to be a shift toward efficiency, meaning it would be highly improbable that high energy signals would be broadcast in all directions for very long.

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The difficulty in receiving even very high energy signals even from the nearest planets, and the improbability of listening during the specific years that very high energy signals might be broadcast before resource restrictions suggest energy not be uselessly wasted; suggest it is not surprising at all that we haven't heard from aliens....even if they occupy the nearest suspected Earth like planet.