Extension to both extensions.

I just found an article that sort of covers what I said in my previous post. You can read it here.

One thing that is important for this is to confirm that my earlier post is in no way unique or original.

Four out of the three arguments are silly, but one of them is similar to mine.

"In other words, SETI’s technical approach is wrong. Variations on this theme are to suggest that we should instead be looking for gamma rays (more bits per second), gravity waves (unclear benefit, except that some people think they move faster than light), or taking advantage of what is somberly and imposingly described as "hyperdimensional physics."

This is similar to my argument, but different from the real core. In a sense, my argument is actually useless because I pose no solution. All I say is that I consider it very unlikely that a civilization that is most likely of an interstellar nature would still be using a communication medium that's slow enough as to be problematic. And since a time when they did use radio waves took up such a tiny amount of their species' life, it is highly likely that their radio waves have long passed us by or are thousands, perhaps millions, of years away. It is so unlikely that we will find a signal that I consider it a waste of money.

I guess I should say now that I also consider it nigh on impossible that we are the only intelligent species in the galaxy, much less the universe. We have shown how electrical activity can react with commonly occuring chemicals in a planet's atmoshphere to create the building blocks of life. We know how easy it is for planets to form, and I doubt there are any scientists out there who would deny that there must be millions of stars in our galaxy alone with planets of approximately Earth's mass inside the correct orbit. We're almost positive of the planets' existence. We know how easy it is for the required chemicals to form. Put two and two together and I consider the idea that life does not exist to be far more unlikely than the converse. I think there is life everwhere.

All we need to find out is how advanced it is. Remember, our current state accounts for an infinitesimal amount of time. It's very likely that planets orbiting nearby stars are, on cosmological and geological time scales, almost exactly the same age as Earth, but on the time scale of us, the creatures there still have 200,000 years to go before they even brew their first beer. I think we are the big boys in our neighborhood, because if we weren't, I think our neighbors would have stopped by, said hi, asked how our mum was doing, etc., a long time ago. Since they haven't, as far as our neck of the woods goes, I consider it likely we're the most advanced.

So I do not claim to have any ideas on how SETI could be done better. We are doing SETI in the only way we can. The only way we can run SETI better is by giving it more money and perhaps just buying it the Arecibo Radio Observatory as a Christmas present.

I'm also not arguing against the existance of ET. I am utterly positive they're out there, it just doesn't matter enough right now to me or to them to bother doing anything about it.

I'm just saying that no matter how thourough we are, or how sensitive our equipment becomes, I seriously doubt we'll ever hear anything.