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Very easy answer to that paper... for example, how does a tribe of isolated amazon jungle natives communicate with the rest of the world when their best technology for communication are clap sticks and smoke signals. What sort of response are they looking for??...a response using their methods of communication. Little do they know that all around them is a cacophony of noise and plethora of signals that they not only can't even detect, but would they even know what was being said even if they could detect them.
Here's another example....from Star Trek. The V'ger space probe sends a signal down to Earth. No one responds to the signal because no one even knows what the message is that's being sent. Spock figures out that the signal is a simple carrier wave message....radio. Everyone, including himself, is perplexed. How would you respond to such as simple technology. Luckily enough, they aren't too far ahead technologically speaking to have forgotten what a radio is and manage to be able to respond accordingly. What would happen if they had've been 1000, 10000, 100000 or more years ahead of that stage of technological development. How many people alive today can competently make a flint knife or stone tool. Haft a spear or even light a fire!!!!.
If you were flying over the Amazon, would you necessarily stop and go check out who was burning some wood on a fire in an isolated village 39000 feet down below??? Would you even bother to be interested???
The only extraterrestrial civilisations that would even bother with us would most likely be those relatively close to us in technological development and that had their own reasons for wanting to come here. Unless they were interested in the "primitive cavemen" in a scientific sense or had some vested interest themselves in Earth, those civilisations many millenia ahead of us would have little interest in wanting to interact with us. Do most people alive today particularly want to go and have an in depth philosophical conversation with isolated Amazonian tribes people??? I think you'll be able to answer that question quite easily yourselves.
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