Conclusion

The bottom line of what we learned in this chapter is that while there theoretically is lots of planets that are habitable, our detection systems are not good enough to detect alien civilizations below a Type 2 on the Kardashev Scale and those are nowhere to be found. Maybe we are just the earliest intelligent species to emerge from primitive lifeforms.

This might aswell be due to a lot of other reasons instead, such as for example Great Filters that most species succomb to. All we know is that if we are looking to contact other species at all, we should be very cautious at that and should eventually not try to do so at all if our counterpart is more technologically advanced than we are today. Not only is it hard to communicate over long distances and therefore long time delays without being reminded of a scenario like the Cold War, but it's furtherly complicated by the fact that humanity isn't a singular unit of certainty in all matters but rather a diffuse mass of countries that might all have different intentions when being faced with alien life.

Personal Opinion

In my personal opinion, we should let sleeping dogs lie. I don't think it's a particularly great idea to try and send out signals unaware of who might receive them because by doing so we are serving ourselves on a silver platter.

Actually, what we are currently doing is the best thing we could do, if you ask me: We are observing systems that are likely to harbor life but are equally as likely not to harbor life more advanced than ours, simply because their stars are not being surrounded by any Dyson structures or more abstract ways of harvesting them.

The best example is the Trappist System. Of all of our options, it's the most likely one to have life on some of it's planets and it has just recently been anounced as the new observation target for the James Webb Space Telescope. Not only would primitive life on one of it's planets be interesting to observe but their habitability makes it a great colonization target to keep in mind for our distant future.

Let's give it a proper closer look!