Like, we’re destroying the one place we know is a sure bet on where we can prosper if we keep it healthy, but instead the world’s richest man is trying to expand to other planets while this one’s ability to sustain life is in jeopardy. IMO that makes us potentially a very stupid species compared to a species that doesn’t really care about meeting other aliens because they value the life on their own planet far more than we do.
Space is really, really big and the earth’s radio wave hasn’t hit all that many systems, so it’s no surprise that no one has contacted us, but why we don’t see the radio waves of the rest of the galaxy? Probably because we don’t have the tech to pick up a signal. We can barely see that stars have planet around them – I don’t think we can pick up a faint signal from one of those planets as different from the background.
Because the galaxy is fucking huge and signals attenuate
Yeah, in theory light signals shouldn’t attenuate in a vacuum, but in reality no vacuum is truly empty and the distances are literally astronomical. Then add that spherical signals necessarily drop with the square of distance, and all the interesting locations (stars) have a lot of background noise, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if communication between solar systems just isn’t possible – or requires extremely good tech for very narrowly optimized conditions (i.e. local stars only).
All speculative since this isn’t really my field, but points worth considering at least.
The galaxy isn’t a vacuum it has tons of shit and lots of background radiation.