I’ve had the ‘pleasure’ of knowing some of the twists who work for the SETI program. And I use the word twit loosely, some are very good when it comes to their field, sorta like an autistic child who can do amazing things in one very narrow field but is a complete idiot in everything else and has nothing in the common sense department.

A few problems with their hyposthis
Those aliens they’re looking for would needed to been broadcasting in the frequencies that SETI is searching, and it would have had to happen a loooong time in the past, so long ago that it is now reaching earth. The energy from those transmissions would have to be soooo damn powerful they could reach earth and it would of have to be transmitted in the direction of earth. Now for those who don’t understand, It really doesn’t take a lot of power to transmit very directed signal at a source like the do with satellites, but then again they are aimed at the earth and only a few miles away, not hundreds of billions of miles away.

Now this window of transmission that we would be looking at, if we model on the only example we have is less than 100 years. We’ve changed how we transmit, from analog to digital. The technology we used has changed and with the internet will most likely change yet again and we’ll go ‘dark’ soon except for very precisely directed beams to satellites who beam it back to earth, not into space.

So timing wise, you’re talking few hundred million years ago an alien race transmitted signals out into space at a huge power wattage exactly in out direction. And someone here was listening. I believe you will have more chance of winning the big prize in the lottery 4 times in a row than finding anything thru SETI.

This is a great chart. It shows what a waste of good money and resources SETI is and how it could be used to do something more valuable, like be spent on defense to kill people who interfere with our corporate goals, or maybe deforest some place with species that only exist there, or something entirely useful like strip mining some mineral from a enviromentally sensitive spot on the planet.