> any civilization advanced enough to explore their own solar system would have been using radio long before then. Perhaps we just missed the signals? Let's p

> any civilization advanced enough to explore their own solar system would have been using radio long before then. Perhaps we just missed the signals? Let's ponder some timescales. The Earth has been around ~4.5 billion years, life began a half billion to a billion years later. It wasn't until about 2 million years ago that the species that was to evolve into modern humans started to use fire. That's 3.498 billion years or so of life before what we might considered civilization. Humans first started using radio about 125 years ago. An instant in cosmic timescales. Powerful broadcast radio signals first showed up in 1930s. We are already starting to transition to lower power point-to-point wireless transmission. That means our radio waves are become far less detectable at stellar distances. Give it another 25 or 50 years and humans might well have gone silent, for all practical purposes, to hypothetical aliens. To have another advanced civilization arise both within detection distance of Earth and in an overlapping instant of time where we might detect each other? The odds are unfathomably tiny.