I like where your head's at, but consider that email is vastly superior to snail mail. We haven't abandoned it entirely, we've just started ignoring it and let

I like where your head's at, but consider that email is vastly superior to snail mail. We haven't abandoned it entirely, we've just started ignoring it and let the parasites fill it up with spam. If humanity is typical of civilizations, I'd expect the EM spectrum near more advanced civilizations to be buzzing with ads, scams, and malware--most of which is ignored by that civilization. They haven't said hi because our broadcasts are caught in their spam filer, and we don't know about their spam because it's down out by their star. It works the other way too: Back when we were single celled organisms, we used to communicate with chemical markers. Now that we're bigger, we mostly ignore that space because our immune systems (read: spam filter) let us get away with that ignorance (mostly).