This is what I thought also.

Maybe they didn’t find any signals, but just said, “To heck with it. We’ll just say we found 100 signals, and let them come to us!”

At the same time, no advanced civilizations will be using coherent RF communications that stand out from the noise floor, because it makes little sense to keep doing that once your civilization understands information theory.

Still, SETI was an undeniably cool thing to try, and I'm glad they did. Lots of other cooperative-computing tasks grew out of the same idea as the article mentions.

Outside of this safety Bubble there's a strong tendency for conflict and war. Only after two cruel world wars and a prolonged cold war, the western world got their shit together and decided 'enough of that'. And even that doesn't seem to hold much longer, so it seems we will only have managed to live peaceful among each other without an immediate conflict with somebody (cold war) for roughly 30 years.

If aliens are remotely like us, they shouldn't know about us.

Nobody wants our Lego.

I'm only half-joking.

Let's say they have had thousands of years of Nuclear Fusion, for example, it wouldn't surprise me if they could produce any elements they need by fusing hydrogen.

But let's say they didn't, and they do in fact see Earth as a rare jewel full of precious materials... the logistics of taking our natural resources just seems like a joke. Surely the juice isn't worth the hundreds of years of planning and logistics squeeze.

I used to buy this dark forest idea, because it's scary and exciting, but I think the biggest mistake is projecting our behaviours onto extra-terrestrials.

If they wanted to destroy Earth they'd just slightly nudge a big asteroid in our direction and be done with it.

/ sorry for the ADHD rant

Here's a later article from 2010: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00945...

Even if we credit the idea that it's unsafe to transmit, there are reasons to do it anyway, e.g. you have a holy text and a mission to share it with the universe.

Sounds like a great sci-fi premise. "Hey, there aren't enough knock-down, drag-out religious wars on Earth. Let's start beef with the nuclear-armed, FTL-capable sky wizard cult on Epsilon Eridani 4."