Basically, two or more phones, or a radio station and radios, are entangles, allowing for instant communication across any distance. Best part about this is, noone outside the connection can break into it; they need one of the phones/radios.

It’s only those who want to advertise their presence, or who don’t care one way or the other, who are potential SETI targets.

The very fact we are listening at all automatically means we are targeting only those who don’t mind being found. Which means they are going way out of their way to make themselves obvious.

That’s why I have always championed microwaves. They may communicate with tachyons or neutrinos, but they know astronomers will be mapping the sky’s microwaves, as they do if they are astronomers.

Also, a microwave beacon can be easily devised which is obviously artificial, yet easily detectable by any receiver of natural microwave radiation. They will be listening for ours, and if they want to make their presence known, they will be calling out.

Maybe the assumptions we’re making about advanced communication are like a primitive aborigine assuming that advanced civilizations would communicate across oceans with mountain-sized drums.

The IR radiation that any large-scale use of energy has to release isn’t going to be easily observable near stars.

What else would be a signpost that would be the same regardless of level of technology? I’m thinking of things that are side effects, not deliberate attempts to make contact.

It’s possible that nobody is broadcasting across interstellar space on purpose for the same reason that people swimming in shark-infested waters try not to do a lot of splashing.

Communication with extraterrestrials is hard, hell, even communicating on the Zone is prone to misinterpretation!

I do like “The Waterhole” tag, but I think the waterhole concept, in fact, the whole idea of microwave SETI, has fallen out of favor with SETI researchers. (Yes, there are fads and fashion in science.)

After 50 years with no successes, people are getting ready to try something else, like laser beacons or infrared surveys for Type II civilizations. I still like the idea of microwaves, because as my essay “Reality Check” points out, we already have very good technology in place there, it can be piggybacked on other astronomy research at minimal cost, and ETIs have very good reasons other than communication to use microwaves as beacons.

On a side note, I vote that we rename Community “The Waterhole”

Specifically,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal

Anybody can make a Wikipedia entry, so they can’t always be trusted for accuracy or bias, or for being up to date. But this one has the ring of truth to it.

Although ET may communicate by some exotic method we may not be familiar with, the microwave spectrum is still a good place for anyone to put a beacon because astronomers of all species will be using it to map the interstellar medium, so someone will be listening.

In this region, there is very little background static, so the Signal to Noise ratio will be very good. Radio astronomers particularly like the Waterhole (everyone comes to the waterhole to drink, right?), there, in a deep dip in the microwave background, and between the emission spikes of the H (21 cm) and OH-(18 cm) radical. Those species exist in molecular clouds and if ET is into astronomy, he’ll be monitoring those freqs. Of course, there are a lot of possible channels between those two, and many more throughout the bottom of the Waterhole. It is a needle-in-a-haystack problem.

I would suggest listening at any harmonic of any common emission spike in that region. Those spikes are the emission lines in the microwave spectrum we use to identify molecules in deep space.

http://www.astronomynow.com/news/n1004/26seti5/

We were lucky enough as it was to hear what could possibly be another civilization on the radio waves. Personally, I think the reason the universe seems so quiet is because everyone’s switched to quantam radio.