If

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

If we are to say SETI is a waste of time on the idea that alien intelligences are likely either much less advanced than us and thus uncontactable, or vastly more advanced than us and thus must both be aware of us and be deliberately ignoring us, well-

Depending on what threshold you choose for when super-advanced ETI would 'notice' us and decide we are / are not worth contacting, it isn't obvious we're being snubbed even if we are at a notice-ignore threshold, especially if we don't imagine faster than light technology.

We definitely consider a hypothetical ETI civlisation too primitive to contact if they aren't roughly as advanced as we are, because the only tools we have to make this hypothetical contact are radio and other electromagnetic manipulations. If they don't have radio telescopes, radar, or lasers and optical scopes at least as good as our own they could neither recognise a signal from us nor respond to it, and without a signal from an ETI I don't think we expect to begin analysing extrasolar worlds as probably life-bearing for at least another decade.

If that is a minimum for being able to receive communication short of being visited, then the earliest we would have crossed that threshold is somewhere between the early 20th century and 50 years from now, as a rough estimate. So for any hypothetical advanced ETI civilisation to have noticed us on that basis and decided to ignore us, it must have a decision-making outpost that's been dedicating a lot of telescope time to Earth within 100 light years at most.

Oops

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

Avoided seeing my GP this week about an intermittent, sharp abdominal pain, mainly because it was not bad enough to prevent me from working, and only lasted a couple of days so by the time I was free to see someone about the problem it had been gone for a while, and I gave in to 'would have felt silly going in to complain about an absent pain'.

But now I'm having another recurring problem, a sort of torn pain in the sole of my right foot. That's been going on for months, and when it flares up it makes walking painful although definitely not impossible. So I probably ought to see someone about that, even if it is unlikely there's much to be done.

I feel silly posting about minor stuff like this, when I know people with much more significant problems not going on about them like this. But, it is a sort of goal to post about stuff that is going on in my life and right now what's going on is "foot hurts, walking difficult but doable". Ah well.