Science-fiction fans may fondly recall writer-physicist David Brin's "Uplift Saga," in which cranky old alien races reliant on super-powerful computers are outsmarted by crafty humans who count on cunning to survive. Fun stuff, but also the sort of idea that may point to where real-life searches for aliens have gone wrong, suggest a pair of extraterrestrial-minded astronomers. In the last decade, space has become much more crowded, note Milan Cirkovic of the Astronomical Observatory Belgrade, and his colleague, Robert Bradbury, in a recent edition of the journal, New Astronomy. About 200 "exoplanets" — planets orbiting nearby stars — have been discovered, including as many as 16 lately observed by the Hubble Space Telescope in another arm of our Milky Way Galaxy. This suggests that Earth-like planets, relatively small, rocky and orbiting a star, must be relatively common. Meanwhile, back on Earth, biologists have been setting back the dates of life's earliest appearance to nearly 3.9 billion years ago, close to the planet's beginning. They're finding more and more "extremophile" microbes capable of living in freezing, boiling or otherwise nasty conditions once considered inhospitable to life.

So why hasn't SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, heard any alien radio signals yet, ask the report authors? The question is best known as "Fermi's Paradox," first posed by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950, when he asked, "Where are they?" Even a modestly sophisticated alien species could likely colonize every star in the galaxy within 10 million years, Fermi reasoned, based on technologies understood more than half-a-century ago. Ever since, Fermi and his successors have been asking why we haven't heard from any aliens yet.

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I believe the human ets dont want SETI to find them because they dont trust SETI's motives?...

I think they have naturally put most of their thought into tech and have ignored culture and discounted its importance.

Interesting speculation but assumes any alien technological development is similar to our own. For example if they used light for power instead of electricity then I don't think heat would be such a problem.

Still if we were to find evidence of alien technology, we might only recognise it as such if it was fairly similar to our own so the idea has some merit. I don't think Mr Shostak's comments on alien sociolgy are necessarily relevant if we are taking about a machine or near-machine civilisation.

We haven't heard anything back because they don't want us to hear anything, not yet anyway...

maybe they're just jerks and they don't wanna talk to us cuz we're not cool enough.

yeah, that must be it...

or maybe they dont use radio, they might have not taken the same path as us, or not at that stage in developement.

So why hasn't SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, heard any alien radio signals yet.










Thats because aliens are not like us ,i wouldn't expect them to use radio signals or land near the white house like the movies.They're aliens!, they'll comunicate in ways that we wouldn't even expect. Expect the unexpected!

True, maybe they already are trying to contact us we just don't realize it yet. Who knows, maybe a deja vu is some kind of alien telepathy hehe.

I worry about the whole concept of trying to find intelligent life. If there is any life out there they probably already know we exist and do not want to contact us yet. Should we not respect their decision on this?

Also am I the only one gets vivid "Borg" flash backs if anyone mentions Machine intelligence? Do we really want to be broadcasting we are here, come and get us...

Sorry for being so pessimistic. Maybe I've seen too many space movies/tv series. I can't think of one where every lives in harmony and where someone does not try to take over the universe

Even if we did recieve a signal by the time we got it there is a good chance they no longer exist or in the least have given up on finding us and moved on to better things.
I think if we are going to find any other forms of inteligent life it will be from another dimension. I think our reality is layered like an onion, all we need to do is find a way to discover these layers .The comunication problem will be the easy part.(then again i'm crazy, so i might not believe that way tomarow )

I believe that there is an incredible secret being kept from Earth. In the milky way galaxy there could be a groups of planets in the hundreds or even thousands that are waiting for humans to achieve a certain level of technological and sociological sophitication before they say "Hey what's up?"

Until then we are the equivalent of baby's in a baby carrage. They look at us now as an adult looks upon an infant i believe.

It seems grotesquely arrogant to assume that older humanoid species would behave like us. Sure, if we found a planet like Earth, we would colonize it. We are a nasty, brutish, brutal species, destroying our ecology and one another whenever we can. Surely advanced species would not behave like us. Species advanced enough for star-travel are undoubtedly spiritually advanced too. I can't really define that term "spiritually advanced" but IMHO anthropologists are more spiritually advanced than missionaries, traders, diplomats, and especially conquistadors. No doubt they operate under something like Star Trek's Prime Directive, each in their own way, and let Earth evolve in its own fashion. This is the theme of my book UFOs, PSI, and Interstellar Travel.

~~~Cebrakon

im with you on your theory