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Old 10-03-2015, 10:42 PM
rally
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Join Date: Sep 2007
Location: Australia
Posts: 896
Its an interesting question Suzy.

My initial thoughts :

If an alien race was so sophisticated to be capable of galactic or intergalactic travel for the puposes of "raiding" planets or seeding new homes for the expansion of new satellite civilisations or even relocation (ie interests that are detrimental to mankind) - then their access to the near unlimited resources to build and manage a vast number of unmanned intergalactic research drones would mean they wouldn't be needing to wait for us to identify ourselves, they would have already have a drone on its way to investigate or perhaps already been and gone.
All of this on time scales well beyond our ordinary imagination.

If their ambition was driven by need, then they wont simply be waiting around for an accidental contact - they'll be proactively using whatever technological means they have to seek out targets that meet their needs.

Or on the other hand - Its already happened and mankind is merely a product of their previous visit ! . . . so we only need to fear ourselves.

As for the broadcasts - on the one hand I think advertising ourselves leaves us vulnerable since we have no idea of the intentions of some other race wanting to come here, assuming that any exist or are likely to detect us given the huge spatial and temporal ranges involved.

But would one of our broadcasts be likely to be heard above the much stronger signals that a technologically advanced race might be capable of measuring now at a planetary level that might potentially be capable of detecting advanced lifeforms, habitabilities, mineral reosurces etc etc from afar.

Eg it was barely more than a decade ago that extraplanetary detection was pipe dream and now we are able to detect planets down to quite small sizes and even determine many of their basic qualities.
So who knows what detection capabilities might be possible if someone had optical and radio telescopes in space that equated to earth size or better yet earth orbit size !
Surely that would be as feasible as interstellar travel.

So if their interest was driven by a real need for resources then they could probably sense that remotely or just infer that from our stars signature, so our broadcasts would possibly be irrelevant.
If their interest was making contact with another advanced civilisation (or a remnant of their own ?) then maybe our broadcasts could be beneficial.

So to some degree I am ambivalent, mainly because I dont really think it will make any difference.
Whatever happens - its all part of the evolutionary process ! and evolution is not necessarily kind to any specific species - just ask the dinosaurs !

As was stated we know so little about everything in this field so I am guessing there can be as many arguments as there are debaters.
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