I feel like it’s very easy to miss signals from advanced civilizations because there is so much noise in the universe. There are also a lot of practical concerns with colonizing large swathes of space. A Von Neumann probe is very risky because it can “get cancer” and replicate out of control.
Possible yes, but if all advanced civs are highly prioritising stealth, that implies some version of the Dark Forest theory, which is terrifying.
I feel like it’s very easy to miss signals from advanced civilizations because there is so much noise in the universe. There are also a lot of practical concerns with colonizing large swathes of space. A Von Neumann probe is very risky because it can “get cancer” and replicate out of control.
There are probably highly effective anti-cancer methods which have a modest performance overhead.