Jeff writes:

> Okay so...
>  Maybe we've just missed the boat entirely.
>
>  Perhaps these ET beings, if they do exist don't transmit, emanate, give off
>  or produce any kind of detectable RF for us to pick up with our current
>  technology.  That's a lot of processing gone to waste.
>
>  Okay, time for a break... Maybe when I get back, Wirt will have elaborated
>  as to why the previous statement is fraught with misinformation.

Jeff's questions have been fundamental to SETI from its first inception.

Carl Sagan used to talk about the pride that New Guinea natives might have
felt when they first instituted a series of drum stations on every
mountaintop in New Guinea. One fellow would hear
"baboomp-ah-baboomp-bahoomp-ah" and repeat it the next station by his
drumming "baboomp-ah-baboomp-bahoomp-ah" as a perfect repeat of the received
message, and by doing so, in just a day, the message would be transmitted
from one end of the island to the other, a distance that would have otherwise
taken two months to walk.

Because of this extraordinary technological advance in repeating drums, New
Guineans would have every reason to be proud of this nation-building
capacity. Communications is the quality that links people together into a
cohesive unit, and the brightest and the best of them would know that.

Nonetheless, at exactly the same time the New Guineans are cutting ribbons
and holding local press conferences extolling the virtues of the new drum
relay system, international radio traffic could be going over them, around
them and actually through them, and they would never have a clue of its
existence.

Our use of radio is the same thing. We are justly proud of our
accomplishments with radio technology, but we could be in the midst of
enormous interstellar communications web, using some equivalently unknown
methodology, and we would never know it.

So why do we use radio? The answer is simple: it's all we've got. And we have
start somewhere.

Wirt Atmar