Space Forum / SETI / July 2008

    Imagine a forward thinking Plains Indian hypothesizing life beyond what is
known.

    He excites his fellows to search the sky for alien smoke signals.

    The WOW! smoke results in a concerted effort to look in the direction from
which it came but the volcano does not erupt again.

=====

    ALL of our communication is trending towards undetectability beyond the
earth. Even with satellites using radio signals, every bit of signal which is
not received by the satellite or ground station is wasted and also the object
of future reduction of the loss to improve efficiency. Other transmissions are
going to electrical and optical cables. Actual broadcast is more tradition
than anything else and with all the cable channels even today the vast
majority of the material is never broadcast. And if not broadcast no one not
wired in is going to detect it.

=====

    All of SETI assumes either inadvertent transmissions or deliberate attempts
to communicate. We are eliminating the inadvertent in our own transmissions.
Assuming a deliberate transmission is looking for smoke signals.

    I doubt we will ever have the "come eat us" concern so deliberate
transmissions should exist. It is also reasonable to assume transmission
methods and power levels make it possible. So there are we are missing the
deliberate transmissions or there is something we will discover real soon
which will make RF look like smoke signals.