And that they didn't bother to compress to save on bandwidth.
To me that's the kicker. There's only a 100 year or so window during which you can catch a civilization's transmissions un-encrypted and un-compressed. After that it might as well be noise.
Even after they have switched to encrypting and compressing their transmissions, they might still have have unencrypted, uncompressed station identification messages transmitted periodically.
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And that they didn't bother to compress to save on bandwidth.
To me that's the kicker. There's only a 100 year or so window during which you can catch a civilization's transmissions un-encrypted and un-compressed. After that it might as well be noise.
Even after they have switched to encrypting and compressing their transmissions, they might still have have unencrypted, uncompressed station identification messages transmitted periodically.