Space has been a little disappointing for the last few decades. Since the moon, everything has turned out kind of barren. Every SETI-related result of the past 30 years has been disheartening — “there was once water on Mars” doesn’t really do it for me. There are two big exceptions. One is Jupiter and Saturn’s moons, which are still cool and could do with more checking out.
The other is the search for other solar systems. Starting in 1995, we’ve been finding craploads of planets around every star we look at. The better we build our telescopes, the more planets we see. It seems more and more likely that a lot of stars have solar systems like ours. And if Mars could’ve had water, and we have water, water probably isn’t uncommon. Things are looking up for life in the universe, even if they’re looking down for our neighborhood.
I think we haven’t made contact with aliens by radio yet because we’re looking in a very limited set of places, not because they’re not there. I think it’s more likely that ET is using tight-beam lasers to communicate between star systems; it’s silly to expect them to dump powerful uncompressed signals toward us on the few frequencies we’re searching at the times we happen to look toward them. I think it’s very likely that there’s a lot of life out there; we’ve barely started searching.
In the next decade or so, we’re gonna get a lot better at seeing other solar systems. We’ll be getting new planet-finding telescopes built — there’s immediate-future stuff like Kepler, and there’s also the possibility of giant optical arrays in orbit or on the moon that can directly image earth-like planets around other stars. The data will start pouring in soon, and space will be exciting once more.
All that said, most applications of the Drake Equation are pretty shoddy. You can’t extrapolate from one damn data point no matter how much you want to. But this isn’t really Dr. Drake’s fault. He’s doing the best he can.
Edit: Regarding today’s comic: Dr. Drake’s first name is Frank, not Francis. He is an astrophysicist, not a 16th-century British Vice-Admiral. Thank you to the several readers who wrote in to correct me — I had always thought Francis Drake was just one long-lived and supremely-accomplished person.
There’s gotta be life out there *somewhere*. The universe is just too big for me to be able to accept that there’s not some form of life somewhere else. Maybe we’ll never find it. Maybe we’ll never find it during my lifetime. But I’m sure it’s out there somewhere.
I am looking forward to when scientists are actually able to tell us something reasonably substantial about earth-like planets, or, hell, even display pictures. That’d be awesome
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Typo:‘Dyson Equation’. Methinks you’ve got too many Dyson spheres on your brain.
>>even display pictures.
The pictures will be pathetic. The spectra have the potential to be mind-blowing.
I don’t know how plausible I believe local ETI is after being introduced to Ray Kurzweil’s law of accelerating returns. It faces us with a stark dilemma. Either the nearby universe is lifeless besides us (else smart matter would have already saturated the galaxy) or technology has definite, universal limits that cannot be exceeded. A third alternative is that hyperintelligent AI/ET civs go straight for the interesting stuff like black holes and engineer themselves an infinite array of new computational universes at the event horizon. And just maybe some proxy to their meta-society will bump into us at some point.
Due to the massive timescales involved, it’s quite possible that life is quite common during the lifetime of a galaxy (or the stars in our vicinity, for that matter), but that only very few civilizations exist at the same time.
Planetary systems have a lifespan of ~10 billion years. It takes ~5 billion years (earth references only) for an intelligent civilization to arise. A civilization might not exist for longer than a few million years, if that much. It means that if a nearby planet with excellent condiitons was formed not too long after ours in the cosmic scale, say half a billion years, it may be completely devoid of life.
One argument to counter this, is what I believe to be a glaring omission in the Drake Equation: the equation seems to assume that life will only arise just once on a life-supporting planet, roam about for a few thousand years, and die out. I postulate that even if humanity were to die out after a few million years – or whatever – new intelligent life forms will evolve eventually, and this cycle may be repeated many times in the lifecycle of a planet.
That of course doesn’t match very well with our evidence which seems to indicate we’re the first intelligent civilization on earth.
Obviously the equation simply requires another variable for the inhibitor/wolves, which is itself complex based on whether you can communicate through alternate worldlines.
I agree. Radio is inefficient, prone to interference (as compared to light, for instance), and there is little reason to use it other than in space to ground applications (and even then, weather can easily corrupt the signal, being a direct source of radio signals itself.) A nice, deep infrared laser will get from space to space or space to ground under just about any imaginable condition, and a laser puts more tightly focused communications in a small package (at both ends) than anything else we know of; but — if there *is* something more tightly focused (let’s postulate a single particle wide stream of some kind), then (a) we’re even LESS likely to catch it [approaching zero, too], and (b) we’re not looking in the right place at this point anyway, and (c) the right place is the other end of the transmission, which, not to put too fine a point on it, isn’t here anyway.
My feeling has always been that the window for radiating radio is about a couple hundred years out of any civilization, unless they stagnate for some reason at just the right time, which also seems unlikely. Look at us; we’re going to cable, satellite to ground (which no outer space entity is ever going to hear), optical, and so on. In a hundred years, we’ll probably only use radio to warm up lunch. If that. Only the military is really radiating (OTH radar is the big candidate) and that stuff is designed to hop around inside the atmosphere anyway, only leaks make it out. Bet it detects like crap at a distance.
There are too many kinds of life in our single biosphere for me to swallow that life won’t grab hold anywhere it is even remotely possible. Extremophiles tell the tale — life doesn’t care what we think, basically stick a power producing chemical reaction in that doesn’t actually destroy the area it occurred in and you’ll likely get something that can use it eventually.
Personally, I’m betting on Jupiter’s moons for our first non-earthly life sightings, not to mention our first non-earthly hydrocarbon mine…
If we ever get our thumbs out of our collective asses, of course.
You know what we really need? Inexpensive access to space. A space elevator or something. Antigravity (I know, I know, but wouldn’t it be great?) If could just get OUT there. Sigh.
And I thought the Frank/Francis mix-up was part of your humor. Slightly disappointed now.
The problem being that the sky is so huge, and any signals, even if they aren’t tightly focused away from our system, will be so attenuated by distance that you can’t hope to search more than a fraction of it for signals that could possibly have come from other stars, if they’re any weaker than supernova radiation.
For our kind of intelligence to evolve, you need multicellularity and sufficient complexity of the nervous system. The first takes a couple billion years, and then a few more hundred million to work up to the second. It’s certainly possible in less than a billion years another intelligent species will dominate Earth. Of course, we’ve only had experience with one, so we’re bound to be biased by anthropocentrism in any search for ET.
‘splain this one to me. We’re the world that came up with gulags, cults, torture and American Idol. Who in the Universe would want to contact us? We’re doomed to die, alone and cold, in an unimaginably huge universe because of our own hubris.
Maybe we’ll leave some cool fossils & stuff behind…
I’m sure there’s life out there, and almost certain there’s life in our 50 LY radius neighborhood. The question is, what kind? It seems extremely probable we’ll find single celled organisms, and every once in a while stumble across more complex ecosystems. If we’re lucky enough to find intelligent life, they’ll be either cavemen or highly intelligent, but probably not even close to our level.
Jeez Snyder, don’t you know that the aliens will LOVE American Idol when they detect it. That will be the first contact, when they try to call in to vote for Kelly Clarkson.
Incidentally, if we ever do make actual physical contact with aliens, I can imagine that both of us will probably drop like flies from all the diseases that we’ve never been exposed to. But at least it’ll be cool until the plague kicks in.
The problem with interstellar communication using tight-beam lasers is that the method is still subject to the speed-limit of C. If it takes several years for a message to move from its origin to its recipient, it will have probably lost all relevance once it got there. If the aliens are communicating between star-systems, they’ve probably figured out a way to cheat the limit imposed by C, using artificially generated wormholes perhaps?
A lot of arguments for extraterrestrial life in the universe (inc. Gene Roddenberry’s, in the preface to — IIRC — the original Star Trek novel) start from ‘we are life in the universe, so it must be fairly likely’. Unfortunately, this argument is soundly defeated by the weak anthropic principle (the probability of us being here, conditioned on the fact that we’re asking the question in the first place, is 1).
However, if one looks at almost any system beyond a certain level of complexity, one usually sees chaos and unexpected emergent behaviour — and in my book, such emergent behaviour is semantically pretty close to intelligence. And surely we care more about finding alien intelligence than finding alien life?
This “search for life” continues to baffle me. While it sounds pretty damn cool to encounter life from other planets (hey, I saw “First Contact” just like the rest of you), if you look at life on OUR planet, any time two foreign populations of organisms encounter each other, they pretty much try to wipe each other out. It’s classic survival of the fittest, and competition for resources. So I’m not so sure that meeting life from other planets would be such a good idea.
What excellent timing, considering today’s announcement of the first solar system analog (a Saturn-like and a Jupiter-like planet in the same system). One of the more exciting conclusions to be drawn from this result is that star systems like our own are very common (they have not been looking for planets with this technique for very long, and they have already found one like this).
@iontom: Life doesn’t have to be rare for intelligence to be rare. There’s a few steps in our evolutionary history that could be quite unlikely to occur on any given world, but abiogenesis doesn’t seem to be one of them. The galaxy’s probably teeming with prokaryotes.
@Wouter: Are you sure we’re the first intelligent civilisation on Earth? There’s some speculation about stenonychosaurs. It has of course spawned a variant of the “reptilian alien” conspiracy theories, but the first thing I read about them was speculation that they were the reason for a drop in biodiversity shortly before the K/T boundary. (They supposedly herded triceratopsen.)
So… Was the Chicxulub impact the result of a fatally premature Lunar War of Independence, or did the Inhibitors get them?
@Ben: I think there’ll always be a place for radar. But maybe we *have* detected alien radar, and we think it’s a pulsar. Or maybe they’re all using LPI radar, and we don’t have the right scrambler keys to detect it.
Or, y’know, maybe we’re the first technological civilisation in the galaxy…
@Alex Johnston: Actually, we probably wouldn’t exchange many diseases with aliens. Justin B. Rye compared it to a shark catching leaf-blight. Most pathogens are too specialised—anthrax is the only one I can think of that might pose a danger to aliens. (Disclaimer: I am not a microbiologist.)
And xenopathogens would probably be easy to treat—the tricky thing about treating infections is finding something that’s lethal to the parasite *but not the host*. If it’s completely alien, that task’s probably easier.
@Richard Smith: There’s a world of difference between emergent behaviour and intelligence. You won’t find much intelligence in a random run of Conway’s Life, for example. Emergent behaviour *in biology* tends to be at least somewhat intelligent, mostly because it’s subject to natural selection.
@Abby: I think some view it as a question of finding aliens *before they find us*. Of course, under that view the recent transmission of a Beatles song to Polaris is a pretty bad idea.
Alternatively, picture a future in which not-overly-malevolent aliens have conquered Earth, and a human resistance leader says “Okay, but *apart* from immortality, world peace, interstellar travel, faster-than-light communication, perpetual motion, antigravity and fwyodkwf, what have the aliens ever done for us?”
“’splain this one to me. We’re the world that came up with gulags, cults, torture and American Idol. Who in the Universe would want to contact us? We’re doomed to die, alone and cold, in an unimaginably huge universe because of our own hubris.”
Calvin & Hobbes: “I think the surest sign that there’s intelligent life is that none of it has tried to contact us.”
Futurama: Omicronians love Ally McBeal.
Of course, this is assuming that TV signals are detectable and decipherable (if aliens don’t have a TV, they would have to work out the encoding of the signals) light-years away. Aliens might not know or care about our bad parts, either. The disk on Voyager (the real spacecraft) had no mention of gulags, and it’s possible aliens would want to contact (or avoid contact with) _any_ civilization emitting radio signals.
I am intrigued by the thought that aliens have developed better communications than just plain old radio waves. Maybe rather than lasers, they’ve discovered a way to use quantum physics to relay information. They just turn a quark here, turn a quark there, and boom, instant communication to anywhere in the universe. Now that would be cool. And impossible to detect.
Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco makes a strong case that our mission to Saturn is the most important thing we’ve done since landing on the moon. I don’t know, I think Mars is right up there, but she’ll stoke the flames of your love for space…
TED talks: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/178
What makes you think that Aliens would be using Lasers? There are Masers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maser which provide you with a tight em wave. But why would they use electromagnetic radiation for intra-star communication? By the time your message reaches destination, you are effectively extinct
There has to be another way. Lets unify our forces & break out of this relative barrier.
I think the aliens are -avoiding- contact with us, for the same reason you lock your doors and don’t make eye contact with anyone when you drive through a bad neighborhood.
The Drake equation is not bullshit, it’s just not very useful. It’s technically correct, almost by definition, but it includes at least one parameter of which we can never really know the true value. So it amounts to little more than a guess.
It also doesn’t claim anything about the communication methods that ETs would use, so even if it told us that there are a million communicating civilizations, if they’re all using some advanced technology that we don’t have yet it’s of limited use to know. That wouldn’t change the answer though.
“’splain this one to me. We’re the world that came up with gulags, cults, torture and American Idol. Who in the Universe would want to contact us? We’re doomed to die, alone and cold, in an unimaginably huge universe because of our own hubris.”
South Park already explained this: Earth is just one giant reality show.
Even if aliens used only tight-beam communication, wouldn’t we expect to see signs of colonization and megascale engineering – Dyson spheres, say?
I do think tere is life out there. And probably intelligent. But, in addition to the problems pointed out about finding it, I wonder if any meaningful interaction can be achieved (aside from the very basic and not that interesting after a while “OMG, look, an ALIEN!!!! COOL!!!!”). Becouse really, just think about the difficulties we have understanding people fom different cultures (or even subcultures). Or the problems that arise when we try to communicate with – or to understend the “tinking” of – other animals.
Yeah, that’s true. Aliens are likely to have completely different mindsets.
“Even if aliens used only tight-beam communication, wouldn’t we expect to see signs of colonization and megascale engineering – Dyson spheres, say?”
Well, there are several problems with that. If our own civilization continues the way writers forsee, it will construct such structures. This assumes that civilizations actually survive to a stage where they can do so, that they actually want to and have the resources to do so, and that we’re able to detect them – which, considering that current techniques wouldn’t see any evidence of alien presence short of a full-blown Dyson sphere, is doubtful.
Come on… Isn’t it obvious why we haven’t found any aliens yet? It’s because THEY AREN’T THERE YET! We are the ‘precursor’ race, or the ‘ancients’ or whatever they’d call us later, when they found our ancient technologies and stuff all over the galaxies. But most likely we had wiped ourself out.
Consider how far humanity’s knowledge progressed from the year 1000 BCE to the year 0 CE. Then how far our knowledge expanded in the next thousand.
If you think about it, we didn’t learn very much.
Now look at how much our knowledge has expanded in the last sixty years.
I’m the first to admit I’m not particularly into math –but that sounds like an exponential curve. If we assumed that other cultures followed the same trend, once they hit the technology level to consider space, they’d have progressed to technology so esoteric that we can’t currently imagine it.
In fact, what are the chances our grandchildren will be using techology so far advanced that we can’t imagine it today?
Thinking of things in geological time makes me think that we’ll never see a spacefaring race as current popular sci-fi imagines them. I have the suspicion that any society with technology developed to that level would be imperceptible to us until we’re approaching their level of development.
Which is kinda cool, if you think about it. They could be right here, right now, watching us. And if such a people still had a sesnse of humor. . .
If there were another civilization like ours out there, the SETI project wouldn’t detect it. That’s the cold, hard truth. Our radio wave signature disappears into the noise after a few light-years. So it’s entirely possible that there’s intelligent life out there and we just have no way of knowing it.
It’s also possible that intelligence is quite rare. If you look at our own planet, many species have reached a certain level of cleverness — basic tool use and problem solving — but only humans have attained the level of intelligence needed to build a technological society. It could be that our level of intelligence is an accident of evolution that isn’t likely to be repeated.
I hope we find evidence of alien civilizations someday. It would interesting to compare it to ours.
Why is it always assumed that purported alien civilizations are more advanced than humans?
“Why is it always assumed that purported alien civilizations are more advanced than humans?”
Because the humans have developing for about ten thousand years, while the universe has been around for over ten billion years. The idea that we’re the first and that the rest have started developing after us is like flipping a coin and having it land on its edge.
Got it – Frank Drake’s equation. So I suppose the B_s term wasn’t there initially?
Oh but Francis Drake is just one long-lived and supremely-accomplished person. Not was, is. He’s still tinkering around out there somewhere, though he’d get a lot more done of he didn’t have to run outside every few minutes to tell those “meddling Delaney kids” to get off his lawn.
And by lawn I mean testicles.
They always look like landscape up close.
Oh, and @ Zeb/Josh:
I think we always imagine alien civilizations as being more intelligent because the notion that we’re the best out there is quite depressing.
You’re forgetting Ceres, which is probably the best and closest hope for finding extraterrestrial life.
“The surface of Ceres is probably made of a mixture of water ice and various hydrated minerals like carbonates and clays. Ceres appears to be differentiated into a rocky core and ice mantle. It may harbour an ocean of liquid water, which makes it a target of current searches for extraterrestrial life. Ceres may be surrounded by a tenuous atmosphere containing water vapour.”
from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(dwarf_planet)
Probably not going to find intelligent aliens as we imagine them, but it’s not unlikely that you’d find some primitive forms of self-replicating life.
The mistake is thinking that evolution has a goal and that some animals are “more highly” evolved than others.
Intelligence is a survival advantage that really gets going a while after it evolves. It takes a sustained, communicating population to start to get stronger advantage than just using pointy sticks and hand gestures while hunting & gathering. Compared to insulating fur or 60 mph sprints, or flight, it doesn’t have as much general utility.
How often does semi-intelligence develop in the universe and it gets killed off by climate change or disease or a rise in predator populations, or any of the innumerable reasons that the vast majority of species that have ever evolved are extinct.
Try rephrasing it in terms of another highly specific trait. What’s the chance that planet X has a swimming animal that lactates and weighs over 100 tons? Probably pretty low. Intelligence isn’t special, it just seems like it “should” evolve because we want it to.
It may very well be a one in ten million kind of thing. And while there are certainly more than ten million earthlikes out there, how many thousands and thousands of years will it take us to perform even a cursory examination of all of them?
If ET isn’t a lot more sophisticated than us and actively looking for us or trying to make itself known, we’re unlikely to know about it for many many many generations.
The Drake equation needs to be modified to tell us the number of civilizations that might actually have something interesting to say. Too bad that rules us out of the results.
hm…
you believe unquestioningly that there is intelligent life out there
based on conjecture
with no solid empirical evidence
and your only argument is that “it HAS to be out there”
sounds like religion to me
and since when have any of you given religion any slack for its lack of proof?
This is most certainly not religion. The probability of the existence of a super-natural being (aka ‘God’) is much less likely than the probability for the existence of intelligent life in the universe. At least it is POSSIBLE to prove the existence of intelligent life out there. I haven’t seen a single one for ‘God’ thus far.
That being said, I think it’d be damn cool to build up a Dyson sphere someday just to prove we can
“…giant optical arrays in orbit or on the moon that can directly image earth-like planets around other stars…”
If you look at the highest resolution picture of Pluto that we have, (Wikipedia is a good place) it has absolutely terrible resolution. Maybe fifty pixles across. And even this photo was rendered using clever techniques during a partial solar eclipse from Charon.
All the images of the other planets were taken by messenger spacecraft.
So what I’m trying to say is… It doesn’t matter how gigantic of an optical array we build. We will not be able to image a planet in another solar system, let alone do so well enough to determine if there is life on it.
i doubt even if we make contact that we could live together. With all the planets out there you would think that there is a great chance of life. but chance are that they’re too far away to make a diffrenece
The next solor system is what ? a couple of lightyears away. so even if we did find them commucating would be next to impossible. It would takes years upon years to visit them.
also bring up grems again. Think about, when the english came over ,21 million native died from disease and that was one civilization. imagen an etire spieces. Assuming that we brought every cure and medicine know to man with us we would has trouble telling them to mass produce the medicine and then asking them for every cure they have so when they come back they dont wipe out humanity
Lets say that we are not the first intelligent life out there. But they live their lives as we do and due to golbal warming their planet returns to it’s first form ,a volcanic lava filled surface, and it erase life and starts over
like a cycle and with that whos says there has to only be 1 intelligent species on a planet what if 2 or 3 intelligent life apears on a plantet
Ok so lets say we find aliens out there. by law of life we cant travel faster than light. And the closer you trave to light the slower time gets. using that by the time you reach their planet it would a few months or years to us
but decades to everything else
so either we need to redefine the laws of the universe or it’ll never happen
but on a side note : how cool would it be if they have some kind of 6th sense instead of sight or taste that we cant think of
I believe the existence of god to be unlikely until new information comes in indicating otherwise.
I believe the existence of life (any life, as the parameters of ‘intelligent’ have not been clearly defined) to be likely until new information comes in indicating otherwise.
Re: Diseases
Given that aliens will probably have different biochemistry than we do, the odds that we’ll be able to contract an alien disease outside of deliberately engineered grey-goo style bugs seems unlikely.
Re: SETI
I mean, it is kinda a longshot. I think the program’s assumption was that a sufficiently advanced society would not be using radio for its own purposes, but would rather fund a project like SETI–the male half of SETI, to switch to a plug metaphor–that SETI would be able to pick up, and that’s why it scans the frequencies it scans: they have semantic value and are relatively free of interference. It’s a coordination game, on the location and frequency front, and an anti-coordination game on the transmitting/recieving front, with species that we’ve never met and wouldn’t understand for a while if we did.
Re: Comprehensibility
I think people tend to underrate how easily we’ll be able to talk to the aliens. Intelligence is an adaptive quality for a universe with, afaik, universal rules. Ergo, the processes and fundamental laws of other intelligences would probably be quite similar, even if their expressions and mechanisms were wildly different. Which leads to my next point:
Re: Evolution of intelligence.
The reason I tend to believe intelligence (defined as creativity+memory+communication+implementation) will evolve quite a lot is that it’s an adaptation that’s pretty much universally applicable. In a red-queen’s hypothesis world, it seems that sooner or later some species will need to escalate to the point of human-level intelligence, at which point its adaptive value will skyrocket. Although our direct ancestors might have been killed off quite easily, the primates were ready and waiting, and in a slightly different set of situations, the pachyderms, cephlapods, and god-knows-what-else might be too.
Speaking of biochemistry isn’t possible that it will have something different than DNA.I mean when life began could of there of been somehting different than DNA but it just didnt surive for some reason. I’m not saying somehting completely different, but like instead of a double helix or something. I’m gussing it possible becuase in life there are no abosultes.
Interstellar comm is pretty daunting. Follow me here:
Say you need 1e-3 photons / second / m^2 to pull bits at any rate off the signal. You want a 10 light year link, and you have a perfect diffraction limited laser spot, so all losses are 1/r^2. Assume visible wavelengths, so about 4e-19 J/photon. We can do the math — we need a 1e-3 * (10*9.5e15)^2 * 4e-19 Watt laser. Plug into Google…
About 4 terawatts. Continuous wave. That’s a couple times all the world’s electrical power. Bummer. That assumes you’ve got a 100% efficient laser. You’ve also got to get yourself a perfect detector, and a few hundred square meter telescope receiver. And I wouldn’t want to put the transmitter too near a star for background reasons. And it’s just 10 light years, which doesn’t get you very far in our neighborhood.
Now here’s an interesting idea — what if we deploy a solar sail like structure as a telescope – hundreds of square kilometers? Receiver area trades off 1 for 1 with laser power. Now we just need Hoover Dam to run the laser. We’ve got to keep it pointed accurately, the reflecting surface positioned accurately to a fraction of a wavelength, and I have a hunch you’d need to do adaptive optics to correct for general relativity and astronomical gravity waves, let alone any magnetic fields or solar light or charged particle pressure.
Now what about that Dyson sphere laser idea? Maybe we could get by with a giant set of shutters.
Rich, I’m not familiar with this Dyson Sphere laser you mentioned but I couldn’t help but picture the death star.
“That’s no incredibly massive AU in diameter moon… it’s a Space-Station!”
““Why is it always assumed that purported alien civilizations are more advanced than humans?”
Because the humans have developing for about ten thousand years, while the universe has been around for over ten billion years. The idea that we’re the first and that the rest have started developing after us is like flipping a coin and having it land on its edge.”
Which would be higher chance than this universe developing by chance alone….
Hey wouldn’t it be totally weird if aliens were reading this blag laughing at us?
A well tuned version of the Drake Equation does explain why we havn’t (and probably never* will) meet intelligent aliens. While life in some form may be fairly common, and animal life might even appear on as many as one in every 100 stars (using very generous estimates), few of these will develop intelligent and EMR broadcasting species ^at the same time^ as ours! Even if all life supporting planets were eventually to develop a technological species (doubtful) the chances of us meeting one would still be slim.
During the 10,000,000,000 years that our sun will be life supporting we have so far only been broadcasting ourselves for 72 years. While we can’t know for how long we will continue to do so, I doubt it will be for more than a few hundred years: We’ll kill ourselves off or clean up our EMR spamming (by sticking to lasers and cables, or by coming up with something better than EMR broadcasting). If this pattern is even close to typical then the chances of another broadcasting civilisation existing in our galaxy at this time is very slim.
The best way to think about the problem is that we are certainly not unique, but just very rare. So rare that it probably isn’t worth looking looking for others. Still: Better safe than sorry, so it would be daft to stop funding SETI.
The only argument I’ve heard that keeps the Fermi Paradox going is that most technological civilisations will eventually develop Von Neumann probes, and will hegemonise their galaxy within a few million years. The fact that we havn’t met any could mean several things: We’re the first in our galaxy; Von Neumann probes aren’t feasible; They’re hiding! None of these seem likely to me… Take your pick.
*Never: Not within any timeframe worth thinking realistically about.