On the other hand, based on our own experience, broadcasting radio signals is a waste of energy and bandwidth, so it is likely an intelligent society would quickly move to low-power, focused transmissions (e.g. cellular networks or WiFi). Thus the radio “signature” they broadcast to the universe would peak for a few centuries at most before dying down as they figure out how to shut down the “leaks”. That would explain why we observe nothing, if intelligent societies do exist in the vicinity. Of course, these societies might also evolve rapidly soon after, perhaps go through some kind of singularity, and might lose interest for “lower life forms”—which would then explain why they might not look for our signals or leave them unanswered if they listen for them.
Now that is a good argument that doesn’t miss the point. My priors would say it’s not even “a few centuries”—I’d expect less than one earth-century on average, with most of the variance due to the particular economic variations and social phenomena derived from the details of the species.
Without any other information, it is reasonable to place the average to whatever time it takes us (probably a bit over a century), but I wouldn’t put a lot of confidence in that figure, having been obtained from a single data point. Radio visibility could conceivably range from a mere decade (consider that computers could have been developed before radio—had Babbage been more successful—and expedite technological advances) to perhaps millennia (consider dim-witted beings that live for centuries and do everything we do ten times slower).
Several different organizational schemes might also be viable for life and lead to very different time tables: picture a whole ant colony as a sentient being, for instance (ants being akin to neurons). Such beings would be inherently less mobile than humans. That may skew their technological priorities in such a way that they develop short range radio before they even expand out of their native island, in which case their radio visibility window would be nil because by the time they have an use to long range communication, they would already have the technology to do it optimally.
Furthermore, an “ant neuron” is possibly a lot more sophisticated than each neuron in our brain, but also much slower, so an “ant brain” might be the kind of slow, “dim-witted” intelligence that would go through the same technological steps orders of magnitude slower than we do while retaining very high resiliency and competitiveness.
On the other hand, based on our own experience, broadcasting radio signals is a waste of energy and bandwidth, so it is likely an intelligent society would quickly move to low-power, focused transmissions (e.g. cellular networks or WiFi). Thus the radio “signature” they broadcast to the universe would peak for a few centuries at most before dying down as they figure out how to shut down the “leaks”. That would explain why we observe nothing, if intelligent societies do exist in the vicinity. Of course, these societies might also evolve rapidly soon after, perhaps go through some kind of singularity, and might lose interest for “lower life forms”—which would then explain why they might not look for our signals or leave them unanswered if they listen for them.
Now that is a good argument that doesn’t miss the point. My priors would say it’s not even “a few centuries”—I’d expect less than one earth-century on average, with most of the variance due to the particular economic variations and social phenomena derived from the details of the species.
Without any other information, it is reasonable to place the average to whatever time it takes us (probably a bit over a century), but I wouldn’t put a lot of confidence in that figure, having been obtained from a single data point. Radio visibility could conceivably range from a mere decade (consider that computers could have been developed before radio—had Babbage been more successful—and expedite technological advances) to perhaps millennia (consider dim-witted beings that live for centuries and do everything we do ten times slower).
Several different organizational schemes might also be viable for life and lead to very different time tables: picture a whole ant colony as a sentient being, for instance (ants being akin to neurons). Such beings would be inherently less mobile than humans. That may skew their technological priorities in such a way that they develop short range radio before they even expand out of their native island, in which case their radio visibility window would be nil because by the time they have an use to long range communication, they would already have the technology to do it optimally.
Furthermore, an “ant neuron” is possibly a lot more sophisticated than each neuron in our brain, but also much slower, so an “ant brain” might be the kind of slow, “dim-witted” intelligence that would go through the same technological steps orders of magnitude slower than we do while retaining very high resiliency and competitiveness.
Lower life forms (as lower nonlife) forms are always interesting as a source of free enthalpy and from many other aspects.
You, as an advanced civilization have no luxury of ignoring. You have to engage, the “Prime directive” is a bullshit.
And you don’t need to wait for a radio signal. You go there (everywhere) on your own initiative, you don’t wait to be invited.