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The universe isn’t obliged to live up to our hopes and expectations. —Govert Schilling, 1998' Detecting extraterrestrial intelligence will be more difficult than most searchers had hoped. Finding evidence of alien civilizations may require rigorous and repetitive search and analysis that lasts beyond individual lifetimes. It may require a broader strategy, and a willingness to look in new places. It may require means not yet available to us. more ingenious. So far, our searches have been driven more by our available means than by a comprehensive approach to the question. They have been very limited in scale and in time. Ideally, our quest would be continuous; our searches for signals would scan all feasible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum and would be extended deeper into the Galaxy. Thoroughness would require us to encompass the direct contact scenario, recognizing the possibility of alien exploration and expansion not just in our own time but over billions of years in the past. That would mean a more detailed reconnaissance of our solar system, some day including the Kuiper Belt, the Oort Cloud, and the huge volume outside the ecliptic plane. These explorations always will be constrained by their technologies and their strategies, which are likely to improve, and by their financial resources, which may or may not increase. Our searches also may be limited by our assumptions. Challenges to those assumptions should not discourage searchers, but should drive them to refine their methods. The search has been described as an example of too much speculation chasing too few facts. That is not an argument for dismissing its conjec- tures; it indicates a requirement to produce more facts.” 333 Some Conclusions Drawn Searching