General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: The universe is much bigger than big [View all]Spike89
(1,569 posts)Aside from placing way too much importance on our personal time frame (in a 14 billion-year old universe, humans have been recording anything we can decipher for less than 100,000 years). In other words, we take a snapshot of an empty house and conclude that because it has no visitors, that there never have been any, nor will there be any. The time scale is absurd!
The real problem with the paradox is radio waves aren't the shining beacons we once believed. Current best thinking is that the most powerful radio waves we broadcast maintain coherence for about 40 light years, maximum. Most couldn't be received with any accuracy (or even be identified as man-made) outside a 10 light year distance. Now, throw in the incredibly tight time frame (we've been broadcasting for less than a century) and actively seeking extraterrestrial radio signals for mere decades.
Now, understand that in less than century after beginning our radio broadcasts, we've drastically cut back on the radio noise our planet gives off--directional radio, microwaves, fiber optics, lasers, etc. have all made us much more "quiet" even within the limited reach of possible radio reception. It is quite likely that we won't be randomly broadcasting radio waves in any detectable way within another century. Pulsed microwave, some "subspace technology"/quantum messaging we haven't mastered yet--we can't even imagine where we'll be in a century, much less assume what "everyone" uses to communicate across the galaxy.
In essence, in galactic scale, we've been "talking" in a whisper, in a corner of a shockingly loud room, for essentially no time and haven't even bothered to wait for a response, but even if we had, we'd have missed it because we don't even know what manner of communication everyone else is using.