No radio evidence of distant life

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A.D. 2050

Steve Edwards' website



No organized radio signals from space

With SETI (the "Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence program) having detected no sophisticated radio signals, there are likely no civilizations transmitting any within a few hundred light-years* of the solar system.

This implies either that they don't exist, or that they don't still exist (relatively speaking [on a scale of up to several hundred light-years ago/away])** — which would imply that civilizations don't last long.***

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* The Milky Way, our galaxy, is about 100 thousand light-years wide, and about one-thousand light-years thick at the center.

  ** We are seeing a star, for example, as it was however-many light-years away it is ago.

    *** Or that they stop sending radio signals.

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*   "... despite an extensive search by the SETI project, we haven't heard any alien television quiz shows. This probably indicates that there are no alien civilizations at our stage of development within a radius of a few hundred light years."

  — Stephen Hawking, in lecture, 21 April 2008

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