Comment Re:Since there seems to be some confusion, (Score 1) 93
Picking up an unnatural, focused emission of energy from another planet would already be pretty good, even if we cannot decode the signal or even recognize it as such.
How do you determine what is unnatural? Over the years astronomers have picked up *lots* of signals that had no natural explanation at the time but do now...
Personally I think the whole thing is likely a waste of time - we've only been using radio for interplanetary communications for a few decades and things are now rapidly moving towards laser communications. Assuming another civilisation follows a similar path, the time between "not advanced enough to detect" and "too advanced to detect" seems pretty short.