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Originally Posted by Snuffleupagus
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TWO scientists suggest this reason, and take apart their own argument in their own paper. It really is an interesting read and they really do make some massive assumptions they readily say could be confounding factors to their own theory.
I've said this numerous times in this thread, the primary failure of many people approaching this issue is to make the expectation that other civilizations will evolve the same way as ours and that the constraints we place on our development and evolution should be applied to others elsewhere in the universe. Fortunately Wong and Bartlett identified this their discussion a significant weakness to their theory.
"Astrobiologists often caution against using the specific characteristics of Earthly life to guide our search for life elsewhere, because such details might be single instantiations of, rather than fundamental to, what life is. For example, Kempes & Krakauer [59] argue that replication is just one form of persistence, which is the more universal aspect of life. In a biosphere where self-replication of individuals is not the paradigm, evolution would proceed much differently, potentially resulting in different growth equations and macroscopic scaling laws. The idea of cities as an organizational structure of life may not even make sense in such a scenario."
I've also stated that SETI and other searches for extraterrestrial life may be barking up the wrong tree because they are looking for signs of life within our context and not theirs. We may be looking for signs of communication they would not be using as it is inefficient or too rudimentary. This is supported by recent publications and information releases.
This article suggests that communication may be taking place at the quantum level through the manipulation of photons, measured in the x-ray region of the spectrum. We wouldn't know a signal was there because we don't have the technology or understanding to detect such communication.
https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstrac...evD.105.123033
Another theory is that communication could be via signals buried in starlight and imperceptible to us because we don't have the understanding or technology to detect the variation in the photons or understand the encoded message based on the variation in photons.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.13023.pdf
We must challenge what we know and think well outside the box we have built for ourselves. Even using our own evolution as a possible framework, imagine if someone from 50 years ago were dropped into our current context, what would they think? Or someone from 500 years ago? Or how about 5,000 years ago? This world would be beyond their comprehension. We would be alien to them. And that is using our evolutionary context as the framework. The first thing we as a species must stop doing is anthropomorphizing every potential intelligence in the universe and consider their evolutionary path and technological developments. It is likely the path in a different star system is going to be radically different from ours, so why would we think we should expect those from other worlds to adhere to same technological development curves we followed? Think beyond what we think we know.