On the show, the guy from the SETI at Home program indicated that they felt it much more likely that they would detect incidental activity rather than a directed message. Even so, all you've got to do is fiddle with the values of the Drake equation just a bit and any likelihood of advanced civilizations existing at the same time in the same neighborhood could be quite low--I hope it's not vanishingly low. And while we like to hope that advanced civilizations have gotten past all the pettiness that humanity exhibits, other civilizations may be as prone to periodic collapse as human civilizations. Given the relative youth of our own species, we don't really know yet if highly-intelligent creatures are really favored by evolution. The possible likelihood that civilizations don't overlap in time may work in favor of some type of physical message. Once any electromagnetic signal goes past us, it's unrecoverable. Michael P.S. The thing that makes this topic so maddening is that we're currently the only example of a civilization that we know of. With a single data point, you can extrapolate in any direction.
Too, isn't the "we are here" broadcast primarily what all SETI programs are looking for?
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