No ET! Ever?

[Jehanne]

That cliche is too generally and thoughtlessly applied.  Absence of evidence where there is compelling reason to believe presence would unavoidably leave detectable and recognizable evidence is evidence of absence.   The question is how compelling is for believing presence unavoidably leaves detectable and recognizable evidence.

I think the reasons usually given are not compelling at all.

I think that everyone needs to consider the inverse law of electromagnetism, cell phone reception and the number of kilometers (or, miles) in a light year.  The Sun, for instance, puts out a LOT of energy!  In SI units, the Sun is pumping out 3.846×10^Watts, or (9.192×1010 megatons of TNT per second)!  And, yet, the Sun would disappear from naked eye view if you traveled a mere 40 lights years from our solar system!  But, it gets worse!!  The Sun is also moving around the center of the Galaxy at a whopping 828,000 km/hr!!  That's 675.90181 Mach, or nearly 676 times the speed of sound!!!  The fastest rifle only fires at a mere 3.9 Mach!!!

Now, there are basically 2 types of antennas, directional and omnidirectional.  For those of you who do not want to pay for cable, you may be able to pickup more OTA HD channels using a directional antenna!  But, you will have to know exactly where to point it!  Now, fortunately, the FCC (for those of us who live in the US) has some online maps on how to do this; just google it.  But, for ET, where do they point their antenna?!  And, when do they transmit their message?!  And, to get their message, we would have to be listening at the exact moment with our antenna pointed at the exact spot.

If the laws of physics are constant throughout the Universe, it makes complete sense why we have not yet heard from ET, even if they are right in our backyard.