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In reply to the discussion: New model predicts that we're probably the only advanced civilization... [View all]haele
(12,647 posts)Think of it. It's like we've been in a room with no windows, and five minutes ago, we found the light switch and turned on the light to look around the room. We are at the cosmological point where we have walked over to the door along one wall and figured out how to open it so we can see the other side of a hallway going out either side of the door.
We haven't even really stepped into the doorway to look up and down the hall.
There's a span of billions of years for an advanced civilization to have evolved; and most certainly, the only ones we might be able to detect now would have had to have been close enough to leave either physical evidence, radio, radiation, or microwave signals that we currently have the technology to see. And we've only had that technology for a little over a hundred years.
We could have missed the nearest civilization when it was last in a physical form we might be able to understand by 100 years and not known it.
Or there can be Earth 2 evolving hundreds of Light Years away right now - maybe just on the other side of the ORT cloud - and we will never know it, because by the time they get to the point they first send radio waves out to start explore the universe around them, we'll be somewhere or something else and our technology, if we're still around, will be using a totally different form of communication that manifests across different medium or dimensions.
Haele