Given Earth's late arrival, half the civilizations started out there could have a 15 billion year head start on us. If only ONE survived adolescence, in that time good odds they've surveyed, alarmed, and even visited the known universe and may be busy farming / nursing along it / us. If they were hostile we'd already be dead.
Sure, I know about the Drake equation, which computes odds of survival of any given civilization. I had Frank Drake as an instructor! ( Carl Sagan too, for that matter! ) I'm reversing the logic and saying that, yes, odds that any given one will make it may be tiny, but, despite that, given the huge numbers we start with, the burden of proof is on the hypothesis that ZERO civilizations have ever crossed that sound barrier of adolescence. It only takes one success to change the entire picture.
Looking for electromagnetic waves or messages seems akin too seeking smoke signals.
Look - by now we would have installed universe-wide GPS, broadcast wireless power, and Google++. We would have put in guard-rails against predictable catastrophes.
Knowing anthropology they'd want to intervene here, but gently and remaining invisible, again as we would so as not to destroy our unique flowering with simply a clone of their own. From what we've seen, cultures grow stale and need injections of new life to remain vital: new food, new music, new fashions, new ideas. Anything but Rocky-#3,782,421 reruns!
Maybe we don't see them because the whole galaxy is synchronized to bloom at once, like a Queen Anne's Lace.
Regardless, a valid Scientific question is simply this: Are we being nudged along by an unexpected outside entity? We don't need to leap abruptly to "God did it!". If we were, as posited above, how would we know?
Does 'religion' count as evidence that maybe, details to be determined, something is going on along those lines? . For example, given that viruses mutate 1000x faster than we can keep up, why are we still alive? Shouldn't we all be dead by now? Search for that sort of question, not radio waves!
So that may not be the right question but it's the kind of question I think might be scientifically valid and productive to search. In the case of that question, what's more surprising than that life started on Earth is that, despite our best efforts ( ?! ) we haven't managed to kill ourselves off yet.
Given daily headlines, that is a surprising observation, and worth digging into.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
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