Yawn. All such proclamations, predictions, and earnestness about the Drake Equation is limited, absolutely, by the boundaries of what we currently believe is p

Yawn. All such proclamations, predictions, and earnestness about the Drake Equation is limited, absolutely, by the boundaries of what we currently believe is possible. To be specific, it has always seemed to me hubris of the first order to presume that we know the principles underlying a more advanced civilization's communications (or, maybe, travel). We aren't aware of mechanisms more efficient, fast, whatever, than e.g. radiowaves, or, polarized lasers, or [insert latest notion]'. But what the authors of these things seem to never take seriously is what we don't know, is almost certain to be a lot more significant than what we do. There is a chart in my office lounge showing the advancement of human symbolic reasoning and technology from pre-history, through 15 years ago. What is striking to me is that in a few brief thousand years, utterly insignificant evolutionarily speaking, we have gone from first formulating written language and mathematics, to e.g. Cassini, rovers, and LIGO. Ever if the pace of advancement were plateaued (and it isn't) it is baffling to me that someone would think, oh, we've got the basic constraints now in hand; it's just an exercise of application at this point, to e.g. detect other civilizations. That doesn't even begin to get into the Liu Cixin style game theory issues... Anyway. Lack of evidence merely means we're not looking in the right way, IMO.