No we didn’t. We do not fulfil your requirements to be recognized as intelligent life. We have no megascale structures, we have no self-replicating nano-explorers. We are not meaningfully ’space faring’ even within our own solar system. After all, how ’sea faring’ is a society that, once, as an experiment, hollowed out a log and floated it down the coast, stuck up a flag, and then abandoned the project?
It’s even questionable that our signals are detectable very far out into space (and let’s keep it that way, huh?).

There are no civilisations of the type you claim, not even ours.

The lottery is still open for its first winner.

Colum

> There is no evidence of artificial
> constructions in any solar system, star
> cluster, or interstellar location in the
> Milky Way. There is no evidence of any
> artificial construction in any galaxy we can
> see.
These would have to be huge beyond all imagining, probably requiring the demolition of worlds. This is hokum, such things cannot exist.

> There is no SETI signal,
Soon there will be no signals from earth. Recent spread-spectrum technology will gradually cause earth to go ‘quiet’ to the kind of detection that we are currently using to detect aliens.

> The overall statistics of these observations
> lead to the following conclusion: the
> evolution of sentient space faring species
> is so rare that we might be the only one in
> the entire universe.
No, it leads to the conclusion that the technologies you ascribe to alien societies, technologies that we ourselves do not have, are impossible. We are not space faring in the way required to support your theory. We have never journeyed to even the most nearby star. We have only sent out a very few robot probes to worlds in our own solar system. What the fermi paradox is telling us, is that dreams of dyson spheres and replicating robots are hokum. Intestellar distances are just too much of a problem to be overcome. The stars will always be out of reach, we will never have our galactic empire, and probably our society will not last that much longer. These are the simplest explainations for the fermi paradox, and they require no vast changes to our scientific framework. We do not have to throw out entire theories. We do not have to substitute “A wizard did it” to explain life on Earth. It’s grim, but it’s the truth.

We are not alone, but we might as well be, we are as people lost in an infinite labyrinth. There are others in here with us, but we shall never encounter them.

Still, it’s not all bad. You’ve no guarentee that the others are nice people, so the labyrinth is doing us a favor.

Colum

On this, I’m with Sean. Alien life my have arisen elsewhere. It may have become intelligent. But I don’t think there’s any evidence that it’s visited us. To do so it would have to overcome fantastic difficulties, difficulties that we ourselves may never overcome. Of course, they may have done so, but until we have good evidence that they have, I’d be inclined to doubt it.

Colum

Then, in order to be consistent, you must have claimed until recently that there were no extra-solar planets. I suspect you must still claim that there are no moons around extra solar planets (As we’ve not seen one yet, I don’t think) you must further accept that the universe is entirely sterile. You must accept that there are no other planets in the outskirts of our own solar system (because they’ve not been seen).

Indeed, going further, if visual evidence is all that matters, than anything that we’ve not seen cannot exist?

If we have to start declaring things non-existent on the basis of observation, then is it not more logical to claim that these incredible structures you are looking for, self-replicating robots, ‘galactic scale structures’ visible from across space, ftl transport, etc, etc, are simply impossible? After all, we’ve no consistent theory of how to do any of these, so it would be the best fit to our current models. After all, we know of NO civilisation that can make replicating nano-bots of dyson spheres, including ours.
This is a little different from saying that dolphins don’t exist, because on our current models we pretty much understand that dolphins can exist, so if someone describes a dolphin to you, you would have to say “That might, or might not exist, but it would fit in with current theories.” If, however, I was to describe something like the energy creatures so beloved of ‘Star Trek’, well, we don’t have any theory of how such lifeforms could exist. They might, but our current understanding doesn’t support them, so it’s best to say they probably don’t.
The same goes for mega-scale structures and self-replicating robots. It might be possible to construct them, particularly the robots (I think we have the best evidence for them, rather than the mega-structures). However, we’ve no idea how this would be done, so perhaps for the time being, we have to say they can’t be done. This is the simplest theory that best fits your observations.

Colum

Personally I hope it damn well stays that way. There are certain types of evidence for alien civilisations that I think we’d be better off not having.

Colum

There is no evidence of complex life, simple life, or even viruses outside of earth (I think they’ve discounted that rock from mars, haven’t they?) therefore it doesn’t exist. The universe is sterile.

There is no evidence of moons around extrasolar planets. (at least, I don’t think we have the telescope power to resolve these yet?) Therefore these do not exist, moons are a unique abberation of the solar system.

There is no evidence of therefore it doesn’t exist.

However…

There is no evidence of perpetual motion machines, therefore these don’t exist.

The last statement is different. It’s different because, not only is there no evidence of these, but our current theories largely rule them out. As ever, the current theories *could* be wrong, but they are the theories we have.

Colum

Out of 10,000 galaxies there is not one single visible structure in the past 10+ billion years. This means that in roughly 1e20 planet years nobody has built a superstructure.

Your optics analogy is wrong. Take a pair of binoculars, sit on a boat for a few weeks, then try to tell me there are no dolphins.

We can see billions of stars, thousands of bright close galaxies, and listen to millions of frequencies. The statistics are on my side, there are no space faring aliens anywhere.

Secondly, SETI is a passive project. we are sitting here hoping that a radio signal was transmitted in our direction, strong enough to get here without being drowned out in the background noise, and only in the time frame to match when we started listening.

The odds are not against intelligent life (I know of at least three other species here on earth that can unlock your car in tests) , the odds are against detecting alien life. It’s like putting the end of a microscope into the water at the beach and declaring there are no dolphins.