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Sounds like you’re just talking about Fermi’s paradox.
First of all if they were out there, how would we see them? The problem isn’t that we don’t see them but we shouldn’t even expect to. Our television and radio broadcasts don’t even reach beyond the heliosphere. It’s the sphere of charged particles at the edge of the solar system. A lot of those radio waves are just going to get annihilated, or scattered or absorbed.
Even if they did though, the inverse square law entails that the signals going to degrade substantially and so quickly that eventually it’s going to be below the standard background radiation (and therein invisible, it’ll be static; like looking at a TV). I’ve seen calculations done before that about one hundred light years is roughly the maximum distance (and this is even if you don’t take into account the cosmic dust that absorbs radio signals) it could travel theoretically. And even if you multiplied the strength of the broadcast by say two, that doesn’t increase the distance by two.
But let’s say life occurs once every thousand light years. Even in our galaxy alone, they’d be too far away for us to ever see them. Even if they’re millions of years older than us, because those signals are simply gone. Even if you had nuclear powered spaceships roving around the galaxy, they still aren’t generating anywhere near the amount of energy that starlight does. So Fermi’s paradox isn’t really a paradox for me. The best takeaway from this is to assume that intelligent life is roughly less than one per hundred light year radius. SETI researchers fully acknowledge all of this.
A highly intelligent and old civilization wouldn’t be very expansive necessarily, even with Dyson spheres in the mix. It doesn’t follow that we would expand to every spiral arm throughout the Milky Way and then move to other galaxies either. This becomes evident when you calculate the expansion rate. Is it one light year every billion years? One every thousand years?
Old civilization or not, they’d still run into the same problems as us. You have relativistic speed limits. But even apart from that, you can’t really send a massive spaceship at the speed of light, because the first particle it hits will just disintegrate. Just the random protons floating around alone will be like nuclear bombs, practicality dictates you would go slower. The propagation rate wouldn’t be near the speed of light. Even if you went 10% of that, every particle that hits that ship is going to do massive damage to it, plus you’re talking about light years of distance, and that’s not even factoring in gamma radiation… there’s way to many problems with this whole project; it just wouldn’t work.
I’ve never done the full calculations, only the quick and dirty mental math. Even if there was an advanced alien civilization say every thousand light years, the probability of seeing nothing would be close to 100%. The silence and non-observation that we see should be fully expected even if they are out there; that’s why the argument from silence fails, because it’s fully expected by the evidence.
Except that the entire argument is simply trying to explain away finding absolutely no evidence that there are aliens out there. And while accept that radio waves don’t propagate infinitely, you still have to explain why we don’t see Dyson swarms or spheres, why we’ve never detected life, let alone civilization anywhere in the universe. At some point, the thing becomes silly. They’re definitely out there, but they’re invisible, you see, and no you can’t possibly detect them no matter what methods you use, or what you’re looking for. I find it much simpler to say that until there is concrete, public evidence to the contrary, there’s no good reason to insert aliens into the picture, or if the picture includes anything people believe is out there, no reason to include aliens and exclude angels, demons, ghosts, or Asgardians. Until there’s evidence of aliens in deep space, it’s just speculation. They should be there, perhaps, but we don’t know if they actually are there.
I literally just told you why. It’s the physical limitations that prevent us from being able to detect them. But even suppose none of that was true, is the best thing to do if you’re an intergalactic civilization announce your existence to the rest of the galaxy? Why think that at all? It doesn’t seem to me to be the case that that would be the best approach in the first place.
I mean im not disputing that at all. My point is that absent any evidence of extraterrestrial life, there’s no good reason to insert them into our understanding of the universe. Theres no reason to posit a class of things that we have no evidence exists. They might be out there, they might not. But until we find something unequivocally pointing to extraterrestrial life existing, it’s impossible to say they exist. It’s unknown and unknowable and thus not not useful to assume.
I suspect your actual question is more about convincing me as a skeptic. To me, the proof would have to be public— a landing in a public place and filmed by legitimate news media, NASA showing images of a city on another planet. A signal of clearly intelligent origin announced by NASA or SETI. A deep space object that is clearly of technological origin and not built by humans. In short a public demonstration of evidence for life in deep space affirmed either by the event itself being public or vetted by subject matter experts and given to the public as news.
My opinion is simple, im defaulting to “not extraterrestrial life” until Theres good evidence to think they not only exist, but are capable of coming here. There are lots of potential explanations for what the reported are showing: radar malfunctions, secret craft of human origin, intelligence gathering lies to find out what kinds of technology our rivals have, poorly trained observers, a cover story for classified craft being filmed or to hide a weakness of radar. All of these would be plausible with the information we have available and what is known about intelligence agencies and individual actors in that technology and military sphere. If I can explain the data dump without positing aliens, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have my default explanation be “it could be aliens” any more than it would be a good idea to have my default interpretation be “it could be demons.”
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We do see things that could be stellar megastructures. They're too far away/our tech isn't good enough to know for sure, lots of them have perfectly decent natural explanations and some of them are probably equipment errors yahta yahta yahta but the absence of evidence problem is not a real problem for this specific thing.
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