[Baron Munchausen]

El_Phil said:
To give at least one writer in ST credit they had worked a little that way, I remember something along the lines of Romulans swapping cloaks for Klingon engines. It is very tricky to make a sustained story where one side is massively out teched, ohh sure short stories or one offs (The B5 stuff in the EA-Minbari war for instance) but for a whole string of series its hard work.

The colonisation thing is still a bad argument, even if every habitable planet near us is colonised we be hard pressed to notice. While the signal from the 1936 Olympics was stupidly strong and sprayed everywhere to cover for poor tech, the signals from the 2004 Olympics probably would struggle to leave the solar system in any strengh, if at all. So SETI has to look for a relatively narrow window of signal, unless people start sending signals for you too look for. Even then needle in a haystack doesn't come close to describing the problem.

Assuming they are even using radio...

Who's to say if other species might develop on planets with different conditions where radio doesn't function so well and so isn't adopted as a widespread technology? And who's to say that the [/i]culture[/i] might not be different and they might not want to be found by -- or to find -- anyone else 'out there'?