Space is vast, in fact so vast it is hard to comprehend.

So how to find a "something of interest" ET wise in all this? Well the best minds involved have determined the strategy for the last 20 years and this was not wrong at all, just unfortunately it did not give the positive indications of ET that everyone hoped for.

Where to go from here? This is the question SETI has at the moment.

Maybe we need to think in terms of higher than 3 dimensions. For example,

Say you were living in a 2 dimensional world that could be on the surface plane of the ocean. Smarter members of your community may recognise that there was some cyclic event when observing a solid structure ( a rock sticking out of the water plane ) and may eventually conclude there could be a dimension higher than 2 like a 3rd dimension.

When looking for signals or other detectable evidence of ET lifeforms maybe we need consider some events observed could be generated in a higher dimension than where we exist and we interpret the observation as 3 dimensional behaviour without considering it may just be a by-product.

For instance, if I was to think of how to manage interstellar communication then I would still have a serial data stream but I would wrap it into a loop with many times wrapped around. Then I would cover this with a toroid structure of another waveform going from the centre to the outside. This "message structure" would then be pulsed out using a higher dimension as the transmission path.

From a 3rd dimensional viewpoint we may just detect a "pop" rather than anything else.

Maybe there is scope to look at how and what may be detected if ET was using higher dimensions to communicate or even traverse the galaxy.

Thanks.

Thanks for an interesting post, Archeye. The effects of higher dimensional extraterrestrial activity on our perception could consist of almost anything. For us to discern these at stellar distances, though, they would have to take the form of something we can already detect.
Any unexplained phenomenon in space should at least be considered as a possible artifact of an extraterrestrial civilization. Take Fast Radio Bursts, for example; certainly not yet explained. Any tell-tale in these, which doesn't fit well with our understanding of how the universe works, just could be a sign of extraterrestrial activity.
I found interesting simple numerical relationships in the peak flux (signal strength) and pulse widths of the impulses from the newly reported FRB which repeats on 16 day cycle. (FRB 180916). The former seem to favor multiples of 2 and 3. The latter, a multiple of 4. If you're interested, I can explain further.