The odds of us looking during a small window are certainly slim, but the odds of us looking at virtually every single star in this galaxy not blocked by the core or something during the next fifty years, at a reception strength powerful enough to at least pick up patterns from fairly casual radio use, are in my opinion fairly large, so that's likely to be several years time span sliced out of billions of star's various lifetimes.

But the problem I have isn't the odds on flare-out cultures being picked up, if that does happen I could easily believe we've thus far missed it, when/if we start deploying radio telescope arrays with planet-sized areas, which isn't really all that much of a jump from what we do now, we'd be able to either answer the question by tuning into Califrax IV's talk radio channel from 10,000 light years away or pretty much state 'No, realistically cultures are too rare if they exist at all in this galaxy to talk with, because we got zilch'. This all assumes flare out, the bit in Drake's equation that in my opinion is the least firm and least realistic. During the Cold War this concept seemed plausible to people, though it wasn't really even then, and in these days we worry over peak oil and GW, and this too may be a valid concern but it's not a species killer, I don't think it would be even if the extreme runaway greenhouse effect ideas of us turning into Venus were valid, but just running out of fossil fuels and and devastating the climate... if that were a given... would not wipe us out, just dark age us - maybe - for a period of time then re-emerge smaller but harder, so to speak. And that's supposes a lot of Doomsday when all it would take is one culture getting just functional fusion and only that and not one drop more tech than we have right now to basically conquer the entire galaxy over the course of a few million years. Right now, as I said in my post at the top of the thread, we can't say much more than ?????, but the moment we get working fusion, should we do so, which I hope and expect in my lifetime, if we haven't picked up a signal by then I'll cheerful say the probability of intelligent life is so absurdly slim as to make it's occurrence inside even an entire galaxy improbable, because I just can't see, if intelligent life is even vaguely common, like 1 in a million Earth-mass worlds roughly our distance from the a G-type star developing it, how at least 1 of the thousands of prior races that surely should have developed by now in our galaxy having not just consumed the entire galaxy, even at a non-hostile slow crawl expansion.



Precisely. And if they've stepped beyond radio that usually implies some sort of FTL transmission, now that could be some sort of point-to-point thing like old fashioned telephone, in which case they'd still use or listen to radio I'd think. Regardless, this again assumes the classic bizarre "Highly advanced species that acts like douchebags or morons" that shows up so much in this sort of conversation.

Assume for the moment that they more or less think like we do, which with many races one might assume at least some do. Most of these theories of the 'advanced alien doesn't want to interfere, or stoop to our level' then fall apart. Let's say you're us, transported back a billion years ago, and you've some high-tech stuff too, not even Star Trek stuff just things that function under known laws of physics. Assuming we didn't just swarm everything over ourselves and confined ourselves to a smallish area instead, we'd probably leave satellite monitors around pretty much every star or at whatever density assured we'd definitely pick up new people discovering radio, assuming we weren't more direct in our observations which we probably would be. Again, ignoring that, why would we, and thus they, decide not to bother listening to radio our contacting in reply if we didn't feel threatened, I can't see us going in for some sort of bizarre intelligence test or Prime Directive as it doesn't actually make any sense and is just good source material for story plots. Same as Space Hippies coming to punish us for our wicked ways or God-like races bringing down the hammer, I mean cats and dogs ain't exactly sweet-natured and morally deep critters either, we don't seem to consider it our duty to engage in genocide to rectify it. I mean so many of these options on examination require aliens of truly mind-boggling dumbness to explain them:

"Greetings humans, we've visited your planet many times before in the past but only recently became aware you had developed technology, as we did not bother to do something obvious like leave an automated device behind to contact you, or even ourselves, in event you learned how to produce radios"

"Greeting humans, as an advanced an enlightened culture, along with the hundreds of other advanced and enlightened cultures who all agree with us on this 100%,have decided only now are you worthy of contact using some arcane and bizarre criteria we will not divulge at this time as it is rather transparently moronic. We in our many trillions have absolutely no ideological dissenters or pranksters who ever decided to contact you themselves, even though any lone person in our society could do so quite easily. So perfect is our way of thought and life that not one member of our various races has ever broken ranks and sent you a signal."

And that works for xenophobic quiet sorts too, I'd guess if we actually banned extraterrestrial broadcasts for safety reasons we'd have hundreds of people setting up shops or secret groups to broadcast just on general principle, or finding a country that cheerful let them continue for a fee.

I mean almost all these options we watch or read are just cheap paint thrown on for story plots or conspiracy theories, they fail on examination as bizarre, improbable, unlikely, or just weird. Occam's Razor says the most probable scenario is that intelligent life of the tool and language using variety is probably just very rare.