Gonzo said:
Since the Gliese system is twenty light years away, I'm assuming the signal witnessed by Bhathal originated 20 years prior to his discovery.
I wonder what the message contained in the beam was. Maybe, "knowledge protects, ignorance endangers" or "if you don't reply we will assume you don't mind us invading".
Or maybe it was a response to all of the signals we keep sending out into space in our attempts to find ET and the message said something many parents have said to their teens, "Could you please turn it down? We can't even hear ourselves think."
Gonzo
LOL that may be ;) I think it actually makes sense for the signals to be temporary, just look at our own habits. The pace of our technological progress is so great that only at a specific point do we attempt something before moving on since we found something else that works better. Even something like radio wave communication is most likely temporary - we already have the internet to replace it, but that too is progressing - very soon all information will be communicated via light instead of electronic signals, for example. So detecting something like radio transmissions from our planet is temporary - it lasts only until our technology finds something better, which is unlikely to be very long.
If someone is scanning our planet for signs of pollution from fossil fuel consumption for example, they probably have no more than 50-100 years left before we move on to something much more efficient and non-polluting, etc. So looking for signs of life at a similar level of progress as our own makes no sense - they'd have to pretty much be in a very specific and narrow point of their technological development at just the exact time we're choosing to scan them (or rather, be at that point when light was leaving their planet, the light we're now seeing many years later). In technological terms, 100 years is aeons - so much can change in such a short time as to make the civilization unrecognizable technologically. But in cosmic terms, even a million years is a blink of an eye, so chances are that any civilizations we interact with will be at least a few million years more advanced than us, and so are extremely unlikely to do anything we might do today to "communicate" with others, nor would they show the same signs of life (like planetary pollution) as we do - hell, even we won't do that within 100 years or less, and that's really a blink of an eye.
Gonzo said:
So, it is entirely possible that someone high up decided to invest in searching for Earth-like planets that fit a specific profile to increase the odds of finding precious resources and disguising it as a search for E.T.
This seems a bit unlikely considering that it would take us a very long time before we have the technology to go visit anything that's a few lightyears away. It's not very psychopath-like to plan conquests so far in the future, way beyond any of our lifetimes (the thousands of years old manipulation of our planet by hyperdimensional dudes notwithstanding). I suspect it's probably along the lines of what the C's said - a slow conditioning of the population to accept the reality of life "out there". This seems awfully close to showing us microbes on Mars - they're now pretty much admitting that most likely life exists on that planet, and this is a very dramatic change, considering they basically were at "we have no idea if life exists outside earth" stage right before this discovery, and something like 18 years ago they didn't even know if other planets existed outside of the ones in our solar system.
