Sorry I’d im way off here. But if we are looking at other systems and galaxies such as the andromeda system, why should we expect contact? If the light we are seeing from andromeda is two million years old, wouldn’t any communication take much longer?
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We are not really looking for direct two way communication.
Things we are looking for are two fold signs of life and signs of intelligent life.
Life we can guess from such things as the light passing through the atmospheres of nearby exoplanets and then arriving here with the tell tale markers of whatever chemicals are in that atmosphere. If a planet has something like Oxygen in its atmosphere that tells us something.
It is not fool proof and our tech is not really good enough yet, but we already know how to build bigger and better telescopes to look for such bio-signatures.
The thing is that our planet has had such a bio-signature for maybe 2 billion years.
If any alien civilization was looking for signs of life in this galaxy they would have known about earth long before the first fish crawled out of the water. Any alien civilization in our galaxy that reached the same tech level we have now at some point in the past will two billion years will have known about our planet having life and the potential to evolve intelligent life.
We have only been sending radio waves out for a few generations but we gave away our presence long before we evolved multicellularity.
So if they are there and have sufficient headstart on us tech wise, chances are they know about us and if they want contact they can always send us a welcome message in case we have evolved intelligence and build receivers yet.
Of course with enough of a headstart it might make more sense to simply place a 2001 style probe in any solar system capable of evolving intelligent life as an observer.
They obviously have not colonized the entire galaxy, which is worrying to us because that is what we might do if we live for long enough and the fact that the galaxy looks uncolonized hints that not many like us came before us or reached that point.
Even if the aliens are sufficiently alien form us that they do not look for intelligent life like we do and don’t colonize the galaxy as we at least might if given the chance, they should still be visible to our telescopes if they are advanced enough.
We have ideas about building Dyson spheres or swarms and similar mega-structures and those would be quite obvious even from very far away.
Even if they don’t send out signals or von-Neuman probes to colonize the galaxy. we should be able to see any civilization that got big enough, just by looking at it.
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