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It’s an awesome experiment. And it requires huge computational resources to process all the data they take in.
I got to visit LIGO in Louisiana a few years back. I remember they lamented that it was not as remote as they really wanted. The detector picked up nearby hunting activity, and logging activity in the woods. And they had to shut down measurements for a couple hours every week when the liquid nitrogen truck drove in due to the road vibrations it created. It’s an awesome experiment. And it requires huge computational r…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if tons of intelligent civilizations happened to be radiating gravitational waves (or some other form of radiation which travels at or very close to the speed of light) encoded with information directly towards Earth right now, it's very likely we'd never receive them in the next million years due to the vastness of the universe.
What about all of the intelligent civilizations who were doing it a million years ago? With a million years for waves to fill space, you'd think we'd be able to hear something.
And the most disappointing/intriguing part is there's a good chance humanity will never, ever know the answers and will never have any confirmation or denial of any of those possibilities. Or if they do, it might be so far into the future that humanity as a concept will cease to exist. The universe is just too big.