[ExI] Silence in the sky—but why?

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sat, Sep 07, 2013 at 06:03:52PM +0200, Mirco Romanato wrote:

> Maybe, just maybe, civilizations reach a point where they "transcend"
> what we are able to detect and move to another level altogether.

Tracelessly, and every single time out of a trillion? Just a single
retarded civilization will be detectable.
 
> If we were cavemen, we would look for advanced civilizations in caves.
> But if the advanced civilization moved to seasteading or cloud cities,
> they would have problems to detect them.

They must be terribly low in numbers, though, as a mere Avogadro
number of human equivalents will consume the complete solar output,
and most of materials in this solar system.
 
> The same is probably true with advanced space civilizations:
> if they are able to manipulate gravity, build mega scale habitats, move
> faster than light, etc. they could have hardly any interest in coming
> down to a gravity pit like a Earth-like planet.

Nobody talks about coming down. We're still able to see the stars.
 
> If intelligent life move to artificial support, they would have no need
> to live on a habitable planet. We evolved out in the savanna of East

Nobody is talking about planets. We're wondering why not every stellar
system is a FIR blackbody. 

> Africa, but expanded out at every chance available and even today the
> savanna of East Africa is very scarcely populated.

They rechristened Holocene into Anthropocene for a reason. We're a force
of nature, already.