IS SETI looking in the wrong spot for ETI?

[Michaelangelica]

Is the Search For ExtraTerrestial Intelligence looking in the wrong spot?

 

Rather than searching skyward for ETI, perhaps we should be looking on Earth.

Isn't it more likely that in the last 3-5 billion years Alien Intelligence may have already visited?

If so, what artifacts would they leave to tell us this?

(Would they bother?)

My bet is that they would leave some coded message in our DNA

 

Perhaps they visited early BC Athens, with the consequential flowering of philosophy and science. Or in the amazing, seminal 14th century and set our thought and science in different directions.

It is amazing that someone with a stick and a ball of string in c. 300BC could have estimated the circumference of the Earth.

 

PS

I rather liked this

Well as you know, there are ongoing privately funded searches for extraterrestrial intelligence, the so-called SETI program.

And perhaps this program will one day detect a signal that's clearly artificial. Even if it's very boring, a list of prime numbers or the digits of pi, it would carry the momentous message that concepts of logic and physics, if not consciousness, aren't limited to the hardware in human skulls. But if we did detect anything like that, then there would I suppose be some shared culture, even if the aliens were on planet Zog and had seven tentacles, they'd be made of the same kind of atoms as us.

They'd gaze out, if they had eyes, at the same cosmos, they'd trace their origins back to the same big bang.

But of course any aliens would be at the very least tens of light years away, so if we get a signal, there's time to send a measured response, no scope for snappy repartee!

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2010/2778536.htm

[Moontanman]

For the most part SETI assumes ETI's will be broadcasting an intentional signal, something I doubt or at least don't think we can depend on. You're link has nothing to do with SETI dude, dude you type the wrong one?