An approximation to determine the source of the WOW! Signal

Humans are likely at the end of our biological evolution. The next steps of human artificial evolution will accelerate which means extra terrestrial intelligence is unrecognizable to us currently.

We look for modern human-like civilizations, and those obviously won't exist much.

50-100 years is probably par for that particular course. A very narrow timespan in the grand scheme of things.

There's a long history leading up to those events. I find it unlikely another planet will share it.

That is true historically, but historically we weren't at a distance of light years. Given the vastness of the universe, it seems quite possible that by the time we detect another alien civilization via their emissions in the radio spectrum, that civilization has already gone extinct.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Waitangi

More controversially I would pick India and China's encounters with Europe. I think it's possible to argue that both India and China were substantially more technologically advanced than the Europeans when significant links were established. India had maths and spinning (also probably better guns), China had silk, porcelain, paper, printing and the compass; also bigger better ships.

Not to mention the impracticality of communicating with your home planet across several light years.

If you’re basing this off of what’s happened in the past on this planet, without a good explanation as to why that would apply to an alien civilization, I’d suggest that you’re not using a good model. Bayesian epistemology is not a good way to decide what’s true, because new knowledge is created which makes the old models not work anymore.

It is simply a result of Shannon's entropy. To be detectable, signals have to be broadcasted and low entropy, the opposite of what we need for efficient communication. A signal that makes best use of its bandwidth would be indistinguishable from noise for someone who doesn't know the protocol, it is also likely to be precisely targeted at the recipient and unwanted emissions kept to a minimum in order to limit interference.

It is already happening on earth as we are replacing loud analog TV emissions with more subtle and better targeted cell phone signals.

It's hard to find any convincing argument that climate change will destroy our civilization with anything near 1/2 odds. It's a completely different ballpark.

We have evaded this filter. On to the next.

I'm saying that there are absolutely many more habitable planets around than we believe there to be, even among the planets we've observed. We just don't know what to look for, because we don't know what's possible.

"Life, uh, finds a way."

While I can't fathom anything else I still believe it's hubris to believe we understand what forms of life may exist in the universe. Maybe we exist right along something else and will never notice each other.

Based on the range of extremophiles we have from just one planet, that's a lot more than you might think:

* -20 to 120 degrees celsius

* 1,100 bar pressure

* ph 1 to 11

* 6000 Gy radiation (a CT scan is about 6 mGy)

Why would you build this big mass around a star when you can create your own, much more efficient fusion reactor where and when you need it? Stars are insanely inefficient; they convert less than 1% of their mass into energy, take billions of years to do it, and you can’t turn them off when you aren’t using them. Plus, if you wanted to use it for some exotic warp drive or something, you would have to haul the mass of a star around. None of it really makes sense to me.

Imagine the chance of a civilization getting from our point to a Dyson Swarm without destroying themselves is 1% for wahtever reasons you like. If there are 10,000 equivalents to us within 10,000 light years it becomes incredibly likely we won't see one of these. You can argue we're "first" but being "first" out of 100 or 10,000 civilizations gets unlikely.

Now imagine there are 5 instead of 10,000. Then not seeing any gets much more likely.

So my point is that not seeing any evidence of these so far is still evidence of something and that something is most likely to be that civilizations reaching even our point is rare.

As for destruction of a species at our point, that's a whole separeate avenue of discussion. But the short version is that this is incredibly likely. Even if all the superviruses get released and all the nuclear weapons get detonated humanity will still likely survive.

A lot of our advances were delayed not because that advance is hard but because we didn't know any better and just coming up with that idea is the problem. Once you know the structure of matter and ideas like smelting steel (which is realtively low tech) can be recovered way quicker than they're lost.

1,000 years ago we were throwing spears at each other. A little over 100 years ago we took our first flight. In the last 50+ years we've gone from landing on the Moon to reducing LEO payload costs from $50,000+/kg to arguably <$1,000/kg and it's likely in the next 20 years that'll come down to possibly as low as $100/kg.

Barring some cosmic catastrophe it seems that permanent habitation of orbitals within the next 1,000 is pretty conservative.

The JWT is the most famous device at such a point, but there are a few others as well. [0]

The great thing about a swarm is that you can do it one at a time. Change the timescale to a thousand years or more, and there implied size even with our current level of tech would be nearly unimaginable compared to what we have today, while probably nowhere near a sphere.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_objects_at_Lagrange_po...

— - - EDIT: meant to add - even if the world were destroyed today, the JWT would still transmit signals for some time (I don’t know it’s design lifetime, but likely years if not decades).

It’s literally more probable that all life in the universe dies than our government would cover up contact, according to the media.

But two things spring to mind:

1. Computing power. AGI is an obvious one. But can you imagine the virtual worlds people could lose themselves in or even live in permanently? and

2. Interstellar travel ie space highways. Curently interstellar travel is effectively predicated fusion power (or something more exotic) because of the reaction mass problem. But another possibility is concentrating sunlight to accelerate vessels out of the Solar System. This is currently the likeliest scenario for reaching a high percentage of light speed.

Another civilization might notice the IR signature of chemical changes to our atmosphere, as a clue that we're harboring intelligent life.

They probably assume that if we're smart, we're not going to try to communicate outside of our own solar system by radio. Even with a big enough antenna, radio signals eventually spread out and are governed by the inverse square law. We'd be better off sending out a matter-based container that remains intact along its journey, and can be programmed to engage in short-distance communications at its destination. Such a thing could also steer itself if it receives better information.

Life seems way more likely to evolve in a gravity well. That creates certain constraints. Likewise, it's hard to imagine how life would become a spacefaring species without some form of social organization (ie they'd need to be social creatures).

And thing slike generating and using energy and creating living area also seem to be quite fundamental.

An alternative is for a meatbag civilization to go virtual. That's possible of course but computing power is a function of energy expenditure so you're kind of back where you started.