LogFAQs > #964787192

Revelation34 posted...

"This leads to all civilizations attempting to hide in radio silence."

That theory already fails since humans already broke that.

Not really, because you're ignoring two things:

1) There's always the possibility that any given civilization broadcasts openly at first, before realizing why you probably shouldn't do that, and then stopping. So you have a narrow window to send/receive before silence kicks in. And civilizations that don't come to this conclusion quickly enough eventually get murderfucked (and thus stop transmitting for an entirely different reason).

2) Humans, in general, are stupid and self-destructive. So us being the one group of dopes that do the most stupid possible thing makes perfect sense.

And that's not counting less sinister possibilities. Like the possibility that there are more effective means of transmitting information, and only the most primitive civilizations use radio, later evolving past it. So universal radio silence is less caution/fear and more pragmatism. It would be akin to us being in the smoke signal or semaphore stage while everyone else has already moved on to telephones.

Stephen Hawking said we probably shouldn't be constantly broadcasting where we are or shouting into the void in the hopes that something will eventually answer back. And he's generally smarter than most of the people saying "but wouldn't it be cool if aliens?!", so I'm probably going to back his opinion on the matter.