So apparently one of the reasons it has been "largely ruled out" is the amount of power that would be required to generate the signal. Because we know that our

So apparently one of the reasons it has been "largely ruled out" is the amount of power that would be required to generate the signal. Because we know that our knowledge of physics is not definitive, it is entirely possible that there are ways of exploiting physics that we aren't aware of that could produce such amounts of power. We also know that our knowledge of whether there's alien life, and, if there is, what their capabilities might be like, is very limited. We know that we know very little about what they might be able to do and why they might do it. Thus, it would be making a massive assumption to think that, just because we don't know how or why such a signal could be artificially generated, that therefore we can largely rule it out. Thus, I believe the appropriate position is being agnostic. We don't know. If we learnt more then that could change, in either direction. This argument is based on positive knowledge about the limits of what we currently know, not the nihilistic argument you reference. . A relatively-recent example that comes to mind. These days we know of many many planets outside of our solar system, but it wasn't long ago that we had not found any. I remember hearing a lot of people say that the fact that there was no evidence of such planets meant that there odds were very low. They were making the same mistake: of not factoring in the known limitations of the knowledge we had (i.e. we knew that the tools we had weren't good enough for spotting planets below a certain size/distance away from us), and assuming that the knowledge we had was representative of how things actually were.