Ha ha.... great article..... Alien civilizations may not be trying to talk to us for the same reason that we don't spend a whole lot of time trying to talk to goldfish -- we really don't have anything worthwhile to say to each other. Maybe some dimensional-shambling moon lizards noticed intelligent life on our planet and decided to take a break solving Rubik's cubes with their mind fingers to discuss the finer points of time travel with our greatest minds, only to discover that our defining technological achievement of the past three years was figuring out how to rent movies from a vending machine. They would've sighed heavily, climbed back into their star cruiser, and signed into the Galactic Network to remove Earth from the list of potential candidates for the United Federation of Planets.