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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;-jeffB, post: 4217001, member: 27832&quot;]When I was younger, I was pretty enthusiastic about the &quot;Ancient Aliens&quot; theories -- although at that time, they were in books and the occasional broadcast special, not multiple ongoing series.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now? I figure that academic researchers are interested in explaining and understanding what might have happened, and TV shows are interested in <b>attracting and keeping viewers</b>. In my experience, one is a better source for entertainment, but the other is a better source for <i>information</i>.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now, having said that -- a lot of people have dismissed the possibility of advanced ancient civilizations because we can&#039;t see the evidence they left behind. You know, the strip mines, the huge building foundations, the traces of metal structures, that sort of thing. In a different direction, they dismiss the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence, because we don&#039;t see evidence of activity there either (radio signals, mostly, so far). Our planet certainly became very loud very suddenly in the last century.</p><p><br /></p><p>But one way our civilization is advancing is in <i>cleaning up after itself</i>, or <i>not making messes in the first place</i>. We&#039;re working to reduce the volume of persistent trash we produce, to slow our consumption of natural resources, to avoid throwing our planet&#039;s ecology out of balance. Some of us, at least, are working to reduce the footprints we leave on the world -- and advancing technology is making it <i>easier</i> to do this. What if there were a culture where it was <i>unseemly</i>, or even <i>forbidden</i>, to build structures or tools or traces that will stick around long after you&#039;re gone?</p><p><br /></p><p>And as for Radio ET, radio waves that go into space are <i>wasted</i>. The better we get at communication, the better we get at directing most of the energy to where it can be <i>used</i>, whether through larger numbers of smaller and lower-power and more directional antennas, or by confining it to cables and fibers. And the better we get at <i>encoding</i> information into those signals, <i>the more they look like random noise</i>. It would be easy to pick up and decode a random radio signal from the early 20th century with early 20th-century technology. Intercepting an early 21st-century broadcast? Well, you&#039;d better have the right software decoders, and maybe decryption logic, and don&#039;t forget to buy the right certificates for the DRM. Try to pick it up with a simple analog radio receiver, and all you&#039;ll hear is hissing. Which, as it turns out, is (a) exactly what we&#039;d expect to hear from a natural process not involving intelligence, and (b) exactly what we <b>actually hear when we listen</b> for stuff from Out There.</p><p><br /></p><p>Which is it? Random noise, or adult conversation that we aren&#039;t yet old enough to understand? There&#039;s no telling -- until we grow up some more.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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