Hoping Phoenix finds life? Read this 1st!

[Usonian]

I would add:

4. Theory Fourth. Blindness: We are not the One, or the Few, we are just one of many but our technologies are still to primitive to see them, or we are looking in the wrong places, or at the wrong frequencies, or distances are too great and "the many" too scattered in a galaxy with 100,000,000,000 stars.

Or, rather than assume that we are too primitive to see them, perhaps they are too "primitive" to be seen. Must an intelligent race have high technology? Is our kind of technology really the mark of high intelligence? I suppose the answer depends on when you ask the question - before or after the H-bombs go off, or the glaciers melt. Wouldn't it be logical to assume that the highest intelligence would express itself through a discreet sustainability which would be invisible at a distance? I can imagine our galaxy teeming with Zen-like, inward-looking master races. Those few Galactic Intelligences who thoughtlessly choose our brand of Onward and Upward! high-technology invariably hit the Great Filter.

 

[Andy44]

I can imagine our galaxy teeming with Zen-like, inward-looking master races. Those few Galactic Intelligences who thoughtlessly choose our brand of Onward and Upward! high-technology invariably hit the Great Filter.

Perhaps, but choosing to live the "simple life" is a Great Filter in and of itself. If you do not figure out how to get off the planet, sooner or later you're going to get pwnd by an asteroid or a gamma ray burst, or some other disaster which requires two planets to live through. So your race can live like monks, but you have effectively removed yourself from the picture.

 

[movieman]

Relating to this very good point, one idea that seemed to hold promise was suggested during the glory days of the late 1990s. The idea proposed by this fellow (who is, as it happens, Ray Bradbury's nephew) was that the answer can be found in the "missing mass" problem.

Yes, that did seem like the only real candidate left; that advanced societies could be living in interstellar space in 'cold' habitats rather than around stars. But, as you say, further research has pretty much eliminated that idea.

But it raises another point: if there was a species out there a million years ahead of us, why would they be letting all that energy and all those raw materials go to waste in stars blasting out starlight into space?

 

[Andy44]

But it raises another point: if there was a species out there a million years ahead of us, why would they be letting all that energy and all those raw materials go to waste in stars blasting out starlight into space?

You are referring to a Dyson Sphere scheme for using a star's energy?