Aww, no alien empires yet

[radtech497]

The Undetectability Conjecture posits that "all advanced enough civilizations camouflage their planets for security reasons, so that no signal of civilization can be detected by external observers, who would only obtain distorted data for disuasion purposes." This is not to camouflage them from low-tech civilizations like ours, but to conceal themselves from other advanced civilizations that might pose an existential threat.

Even if all advanced civilizations did not pursue this course of action, those that did not might be viewed nervously by those that did, perhaps nervously enough to prompt the occasional pre-emptive strike against such incautious upstarts. Natural selection then works to ensure successful civilizations are those that do not advertise their presence to the Universe at large.

Another thing to consider is Schroeder's corollary to Clarke's Law, namely that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature." In other words, the works of advanced civilizations may be in evidence all around us, yet we are unable to distinguish those works from natural objects and/or processes (much as an ant crawling across a roadway is unable to determine the surface he/she is traveling on was not created naturally, but was instead created by a technologically more advanced species).

These two conjectures, if taken together, suggest that advanced civilizations, in their struggle to hide from their peers, may disguise the already natural-looking traces of their technologies to look even more like Nature. As natural objects and/or processes are much easier to invoke as explanations for various phenomena than the products of alien technology, it is not unexpected that the results of any search for advanced civilizations should come up empty.

Radtech497