When Are the Intelligent Aliens?

I think it is quite likely that after discovering mind uploading technology (assuming such a thing is possible), advanced civilizations lose interest in the "boring" and "dangerous" space-time world. This idea would probably fall into the "Simulation Argument" you mentioned. But in sll honesty, I don't think humanity will ever have a satisfying answer to Fermi's paradox.

Without some sort of technology that renders them truly immune to the "dangerous" space-time world, they won't be able to ignore it, because if their sun burps they all die if their simulators get destroyed. Even if they "all" happily charge into simulated bliss, a residual caretaking system should be visible as it performs the necessary cosmic-scale engineering to ensure that the simulated ones don't get wiped out by a cosmological crisis, such as a supernova. Further, any such society will still end up wanting more and more energy, so we ought to be seeing Dyson shells or something pop up, in the continuing absence of any apparently way of converting mass directly into energy.

We don't see any of these things. And the amount of "space" left in physics for some sort of true escape hatch that might let us escape fully into an impregnable universe of our own devising or something keeps going down and down.

I consider the lack of cosmic-scale engineering to be a much bigger problem than mere inability to detect signals. A lot of it isn't even that "hard" per se, because what's impossible on the year or century scale becomes feasible with only very realistic projections of what self-replicating technology can do if you can put in millions of years of continuous effort. And a lot of this stuff would both be visible, and essentially necessary; if life is so inevitable and intelligent civilizations so likely, quite a few of them will find themselves dangerously close to an incipient supernova on an uncomfortable time frame, and they ought to be doing things about that. Very visible things. It's just too perfectly quiet out there.

>The way I view it, by definition someone has to be first.

no :). That is the beauty of this Universe - global full order of things on timeline isn't possible. Specifically space-like separated events don't have a preferred order, i.e. given 2 space-like separated events A and B, both statement - A precedes B and B precedes A - have the same validity, basically it is meaningless to talk about their timeline order.

The ground assumption in all of this is that we have some comprehension of the technological end-game / plateau. I.e. that a civilization far more advanced than our own will still care about solar energy and EMR communications. Who is going to build a Dyson Sphere for fun? We could be totally wrong about this. We probably are.

The other possibility is that there's not much more technology for us. Can we build self-replicating probes that can operate, without maintenance, for thousands of years? No we can't.

So we have this wacky set of assumptions -- that alien civilizations will be more advanced than us in certain peculiar ways (able to build self-replicating probes and/or Dyson spheres) but not in others (having the primitive needs and side-effects that we do). This is a tiny corner of a very large set of possibilities.

Maybe the aliens simply build new Universes to order and leave their birth universe behind because it's (a) less hospitable than their new "air conditioned" universe, and (b) it's unethical or boring or pointless to colonize a universe full of new potential civilizations.

Folks need to read some less mainstream SF. I like Clifford Simak's "City" where the vast majority of the human race emigrates to Jupiter to live as hunter-gatherers (because Jovian life is so much more pleasant than human life) leaving Earth to the dogs, robots, and ants.

Kraus's famous classic 'radio astronomy' textbook had some comments about this topic toward the end. If I recall correctly it was a couple light years for analog NTSC. Nice stable transmitter, satellite disciplined carrier freq toward the end, and the doppler as the earth rotates of a zillion signals gives the little green men something interesting to think about. Planetary radar, IF aimed directly at the target, had much better range, but analog NTSC television had much better coverage over the whole sky.

The radio detection of the earth by broadcast analog NTSC TV carriers has already ended. The article author specified it as a million years. We got about fifty instead. If the LGM are watching our analog TV carriers and the SNR is less than 20 dB or so, there is no way they'll see digital as a discrete signal, nor will they likely randomly guess the correct signalling types/codes.

The meta issue is as a species we're really good at thinking our time is special. 100 years ago watching a spectrogram of analog AM video carriers would have been unthinkable futuristic not even rational to discuss, 25 years ago it would have been a pretty good idea, today its ancient nothing but static, no body would do something so anachronistic.

This misbelief in the importance of your time is closely related to one of the funniest atheist arguments, which is so intellectually unthinkable its rarely discussed. Even the slightest gaze on religious history of the species shows that before the birth of a prophet or whatever, people really thought they had it all figured out almost as well as after. Because this mis-design-pattern has repeated itself with pretty much all religions in the past, I'm sure it will happen again in the future, so simply deciding to believe in nothing until the true prophet is born in 100000 years is the most rational decision. In fact over 100000 years we'll probably have about 100 prophets, all of which, however temporarily, being considered the last word in religion... Its sometimes called the patience atheist argument, or a few other things... Why, everyone knows the best and most important and most correct culture to ever exist, in the past, or more importantly in the future, is now, of course.