aesmael

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.