"Btw, you have some out there analogies. Fish, tattoos, pixie dust..."
;-)
I know K, but I'm trying to keep this on the level of a friendly chat hanging out over a back yard fence post. A little absurd humor never hurts you know?
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"in other words we are simply to primitive to see aliens- even if they were right in front of us"
A valid point setAI, and to an extent that's what I'm getting at. If the day comes when we either develop, or stumble onto, a practical means of communicating across interstellar distances, we could well find the universe chuck FULL of civilizations, all babbling all away to each other, in a vast noisy conversation in which ours becomes just one more voice among the throng.
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"Broadcasting and listening on the 21 cm band may ultimately be fruitless, but it's a pretty smart way to attract attention for two reasons.
1) Neutral hydrogen is pretty fundamental, and it's a good bet that anybody mapping the universe in EM will pay special attention to that wavelength and actually conduct surveys (large-area studies) in that wavelength.
2) Patches of neutral hydrogen do not exhibit modulations in complex repeating patterns, and any such broadcast would be a pretty good indication of intelligence behind the source."
Actually Turbo I think it's an admirably shrewd way of calling attention to ourselves *given the tools we've got to work with at the moment*.
And I have to stress, yet again, that it's, at least imo, no waste of time on our part to try despite our evident handicaps and/or the odds against our getting an answer. We're NEVER going to get anywhere by throwing up our hands and crying in our beer over the fact that we don't have better means at out disposal. Our ancestors put up with using horses and sail boats to explore their world, and before that used their feet, but they didn't wait around with their collective thumbs in their mouths for the advent of airplanes, helicopters, "humvees" and air conditioned land rovers to do it in more practical and comfortable style.
But... consider for a moment the implications of a culture that has access to "practical means of interstellar communication". I'm being very intentionally vague about what "practical means of interstellar communication" means for a reason. I've got no idea what that means would be. I'm a cave dweller speculating on the possible existence of radio waves here remember, we all are.
*IF* such means even exist, and frankly, I think we all have to admit that none of us have any way at all of knowing that one way or another at *this* point in time, then it's possible that nobody out there is "mapping the universe in the EM bands" anymore (at least no one still restricted to such primitive means of mapping things, that also happens to be close enough to respond with an answer in the next thousand years).
Why bother continuing to map the universe in the EM band when you've got much more interesting and productive ways of mapping things? Any such civilizations may have completed "mapping the universe" at least in the EM band, several thousand years ago, and moved on to mapping it by considerably more productive ways. The EM band might well be something they just don't bother paying much attention to anymore.
All of which could be mistaken for an argument against things like SETI, but it's not, it's an argument for patience an perseverance.
Fermi, for all his genius, was being a bit of a jackass imo, by posing the question that if there IS intelligent life out there, why haven't we all ready heard from them?
All I'm trying to point out is that there are probably PLENTY of reasons we haven't heard from them, that getting and answer soon or easily could very well be unlikely, and that inferring that there's no one out there just because we haven't heard from them (using what could well be woefully primitive and inadequate means of doing so), borders on childish petulance and sublime arrogance.
) likely to yield something, if only a qualified negative result.