Observations or assumptions about the presence or prevalence of life which take as a premise that we could detect them are IMO meaningless. In particular, work

Observations or assumptions about the presence or prevalence of life which take as a premise that we could detect them are IMO meaningless. In particular, work like this makes assumptions about what it means to be "loud" which contain what amounts IMO to a profoundly inane belief that advanced civilizations would employ communications that are similar enough to our own that we could detect them, or, would leak energy in a fashion we could detect. Both of these premises are deeply anthropocentric, in specific, they extrapolate from our current and 20th c. level technologies and understanding of physics, material science, etc., not even touching on philosophical matters like the dark forest hypothesis, which are so myopic as to be comical. Idle comment, sometime in the last year or so there was a detailed write up of a zero-day no-touch exploit for the iPhone, which included a nice tour through the wireless stacks and hacks Apple uses to do things like proximal device detection and networking. What struck me at the time and continues to inform my opinion on these SETI questions is, without the frame for understanding the why- and how- going on in the iPhone, the scale of effort it would take a naive investigator to build a basic model of what was going on and why, is already at the threshold of human comprehension. While in this specific case what's at issue is EMF using crudely comparable encoding schemes, the point is simply that even knowing about various obvious ways of encoding binary information for transmission in a noisy environment, the active signal(s) are already close to the edge of discernible from noise, especially complex but true noise. I.e., even in the EMF domain, we're already for fungible consumer goods dealing with multiple frequency-hopping handshakes and sniffs and stochastic back-off and retry and error correction. But there is no good reason to assume some other civilization at some other level of advancement would have any use for EMF. There are even with known technologies all sorts of exotic, more efficient, more targeted, ways of doing long-distance communication. Helically polarized lasers come to mind... Anyway. I think the authors of these things need to be a lot more humble about their presumptions, or at minimum, spell them out plainly...