I’ve read we’re already moving into that phase. We used to broadcast radio & TV waves all over, but nowadays we confine a lot of that to wires, cables and tight-beam communication to and from satellites. We’re already growing dark, while more active than ever.
There is for all *practical *purposes *no *chance that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe.
I’ve noticed in other threads that you have very strong opinions based on nothing but your very strong opinions.
As mentioned repeatedly in this thread, we have no idea yet how common life is, how long planets can sustain life, and how often intelligent life can develop.
The OP was wrong by jumping to the conclusion that intelligent life is abundant but you’re equally wrong to jump to the conclusion that intelligent life is absent. We have no data to support either conclusion.
How do you know? For all we know there’s an intelligent species on Alpha Centauri. And while they generate plenty of radio noise, the inverse square law means that by the time it gets to Earth it is indistinguishable from noise.
But if we knew about them, we could potentially communicate with them using special-purpose lasers somewhere on the EM spectrum. Sure, we’d have to wait 9 years for a reply to our transmission, but so what?
Of course, I don’t actually expect there to be human-equivalent intelligent aliens on a planet around Alpha Centauri, or even multicellular life forms, or even any kind of life.
All we know is that the probability is somewhere between zero and one.
Yes, an intelligent species in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud might as well not exist, since we couldn’t detect it even if it did. But there are lots of stars that are only a few light years away from us. I would say that there is absolutely no possibility of interstellar travel in the next 100 or 200 years, we’re not going to be visiting these guys and sitting down at a quaint multispecies tavern in a seedy spaceport bar.
But the bare fact of the detection of the existence of life on other planets–any sort of life, not just intelligent life–would be enormously important. And we may have such information within decades. Or we might not.
Realistically, we were never anything but dark. Because, if you take the most coherent laser aimed at space, by the time it reaches the edge of the Oort cloud, about a light-year away (arguably the boundary of our solar system), that pinprick of light will be a disc more than a quarter of a billion miles across, with the concomitant reduction in signal strength. Add to this the interstellar medium (dust and stuff) and solar interference (no signal from Earth will be out-shining the sun, and at a distance, the Earth cannot be distinguished from the sun in line of sight) and multiply that by the much greater beam spread of all our normal transmissions.
In EM, we are “dark”, we always have been “dark”, and we always will be “dark”.