Please literally explain it like I’m 5! TIA
Edit- thank you for all the comments and particularly for the links to videos and further info. I will enjoy trawling my way through it all! I’m so glad I asked this question i find it so mind blowingly interesting
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Other folks have explained the *what* question really well. My answer will include my personal preferred *solution*. Other folks will have theirs, or they might certainly be able to provide counterpoint to what I’m about to write.
My personal educated opinion is that life in some form is abundant throughout the galaxy. Intelligent life is rare, but my optimistic side says it’s greater than zero (in addition to us humans).
Assuming that much, my brain has chosen to divide those potential alien civilizations into three logical groups, depending on how their advancement level compares to ours.
The first group are the normal Star Trek-style aliens who are roughly on par with humans technologically (maybe within a century or two). Those aliens would be exceedingly hard to find — our solar system is about 4.5 billion years old, but humans have been using radio for about a century. To find some other civilization in the middle of that equivalent microscopic snapshot would be extremely unlikely. So they can be logically disregarded in any traditional SETI radio search.
The second group are the aliens who are less advanced than we are. They’re the ones who haven’t discovered radio yet. We can also disregard them — if they exist, they’re not talking in ways that we can hear.
That leaves the third group of aliens, who are *more* advanced than we are. The question then becomes, how *much* more advanced? At least on the order of thousands, probably on the order of *millions* of years more advanced. Their data requirements in communication are probably so large, and their data compression needs so extreme, that any transmissions we overhear are probably indistinguishable from background noise if we’re limited to Earth-modern technology.
To find a civilization communicating at that level (assuming they’re even using radio in the first place, as opposed to some more advanced kind of physics we haven’t yet discovered) would be a lot like tapping into a copper wire, looking for Morse Code pulses, and finding Modem static instead.
If all you knew was Morse, would you even recognize the Modem static as intelligent, let alone have any way of deciphering it? Probably “no”, either way.
On Earth it took about a century to graduate from telegraphs to Modems, and Modems themselves are already obsolete even within our lifetime. Add another million years to that development rate and you can start to see the problem.
TLDR: if aliens exist, either they’re not talking, or we haven’t learned how to listen.
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