Has anyone thought that...

Greg Bear Posited this scenario. He called it the Hawk and dove. interstellar Civilizations that are doves act much like us. Broadcasting their noise signals into space.
Hawks act silently out of fear or gile. they communicate but in ways that aren't perceived by what we consider normal means
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Some signaling technology other than the electromagnetic one we use is always a possibility. Limiting the field to electromagnetism, even our own digital signals sound increasingly like random noise. Such signals with an extraterrestrial source might be impinging on SETI receivers right now and pass unnoticed We could try to guess at how to decode extraterrestrial digital signals, but the odds of success seem pretty long. Hailing signals intentionally sent our way will probably be very simply modulated and easy to detect. Michael

Do you think it's also possible that we are the most advanced civilisation at least in this part of the galaxy, why do experts keep saying that intelligent life out there is likely to be more advanced than us?

It's most likely that if we do find anything it will be a more advanced civilization. If you think about how far away the nearest stars are and how long it would take for signals to get to us, it's easy to see how that civilization is likely to be more advanced than us by now. (Assuming that civilization still exists.)
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I should add that if there are less advanced civilizations out there it's not likely they are sending out any radio signals that we could detect. The fact that we can't detect them doesn't mean they don't exist.
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Light is a cosmic slug.

It may be ok for communication within a planet but not between two stars. The only signals from aliens we will ever get via radio is probably from some poor devils at the same level of technology as us - difficult but it explains why we haven't "heard" from them yet. Which is great to start with... We could even crack the message they send... Probably the same kind of bits we once sent to M13.

Tachyons would be better, if not perfect.

Too bad it's still a theoretical particle... Wormholes are good too. They could be used not to traverse but to send light in a faster way. The galaxy may be wired with them as we do here on Earth with optical fiber, this way you can send a message just to the ones you want, thus keeping your privacy.

Gravity waves are another possibility... to find civilizations from paralell universes.

My guess is: we're gonna find the Higgs Particle before ET.

Still... I think it's a good idea to search in whatever way we can (afford), that's why I participate in the data crunching.

I hope the LHC doesn't discover any more defects when it get to full power, that could get messy

For 200 years we hat letters and homing pigeons. Now we communicate with light or electric currents. What about in 500 years?
Advanced civilizations will have moved to something much better than light to communicate. Forget about picking up electromagnetic signals emanating from their planet, assuming that they still need to live on a planet or they have only colonized one.

Furthermore, an advanced civilization will probably not value us as individuals or as a form of culture. I mean, we consider dolphins, whales, chimps, horses, dogs and some other animals as fairly intelligent and look at how we treat them!
If an advanced society was indeed interested in finding intelligent life on Earth (because it seems like a good candidate because of all the oxygen in the atmosphere), it would define intelligence as something other than the ability to send radio waves or powerful lasers into space.

By the way, I once heard of a crackpot hypothesis by some guy who claimed that life on Earth was one of many scientific long-term experiments of a super advanced civilization. They seeded this planet with single-celled organisms and watched the evolution. At some point, for millions of years, all that they got was dinossaurs. Nothing interesting was going on, so they decided to send an object from the Kuiper or the Asteroid Belt to crash on our planet (to shake things up). After a few million years, some creatures with potencial arose (good ol' Homo Sapiens), and they come here periodically to collect specimens for lab tests (thus explainig UFO sightings and abductions). Sometimes they would intervene, somehow transmitting us specific knowledge and then watching how that new technical competences would evolve - which explains the glory of ancient societies such as the Mayans, the Egyptians, ancient Chinese, etc.

Now, this is absurd but not impossible. And if we actually found out about it, what a cold shower it would be... Remember that although we don't have the technology to do it yet, we are already thinking of ways to terraform planets, so in ten thousand years we could be conducting experiments like that. Maybe someone then starts connecting the dots.......

In conclusion, if we find intelligence on other planets, they could be more advanced than us, but not much more. The ones that are one million years ahead of us are not to see.

One more thing, we ASSUME that the path of a civilization through time is parallel to ours, so at some time they come to the brink of their self-destruction. If that is the case, soon after they drop the first atom bombs and irreversibly change climate, they also build permanent stations on their moon or on a neighbouring planet, so that if their home planet gets scorched, there are a few communities spread around that make it difficult for the whole civilization to perish.

It is assumed that any civilization goes through the same discoveries and progresses at some point in their history. No matter how advanced they are now, they would have had to use something more primitive before.

There are only so many types of signals we understand as a race, and therefore those are the only signals we can attempt to decipher. Anything more advanced than what we have would appear to us as indistinguishable or even unseen from out point of view. We certainly can't search for things which we don't even know exists! We must take things one step at a time.

Which completely assumes that an advanced civilization would be as arrogant as we are youthful. It is entirely possible that as a civilization progresses or advances, they start to have more respect for other cultures and different levels of intelligence.

Very true. But the goal isn't to find the most advanced civilization. The goal is to simply find any civilization; to know we're not alone.

May have missed it in the above but I recall a conjecture (might even have been the SETI folks themselves) that we may have a conundrum.

As we advance we discover much more efficient, lower energy ways to shuttle our communications around. Cell towers are now Earth bound and we don't bounce messages off satellites in orbit at nearly the same strength we once did in our more primitive days. Given the low wattage in cell communication as an example, it would never become a candidate for a civilization elsewhere hoping to pick up some of our chatter. If our days of broadcasting "I Love Lucy" into the cosmos are also over (cable networks and low energy satellite reception have now arisen in place of the ubiqutous rabbit ears television), we are a lot more quiet than we used to be.

In other words, our "noisey" period is coming to a close, hence the worry that perhaps the window of opportunity for catching another similar civilization out there is brief. In this scenario we could well see the radio telescope sweep right by ET's home and he doesn't seem to be making a peep. He is, but at such a low level locally that it's beyond our means to listen in.

Just another of the possiblities, but certainly not something to hang your hat on.

Regards,
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