LogFAQs > #936072837

Currently confirmed technology to exist or likely be able to exist in the future is such that interstellar war is unrealistic.

This only will change if some more sci-fi level tech becomes available. Most notably, a combination of both a highly effective power source, and a proper high speed warp drive.

As for heliopause, it doesn't affect things TOO badly as we can still receive strong repeating pulses quite fine (i.e. from pulsars, even those in another galaxy). Our furthest detected pulsar is about 50 million lightyears away, but it goes without saying that a pulsar is generally a bit stronger than a pulse of EM waves created by a civilization towards a specific star system to potentially make contact (the pulsar in question is the farthest one we've seen so far too). But its not stronger by enough that you couldn't detect something from at least a few thousand lightyears with good reliability, made by civilization.

The real issue is really just more this:
-If you are capable of FTL travel, then you are going to be using FTL technology for interstellar communication since its faster (even if it means just having ships with cargo crates full of alien USB and SSD equivalents being shipped back and forth between systems), and as such will generally not have your primary communication systems looking for radio waves.
-As such, you will likely not have anything really listening for the radio waves of humans aside from your OWN astronomers, and any SETI-like program YOU have on one or more of your worlds.
-Therefore, aliens who have FTL capability may not really be listening much, aside from some astronomers here and there.

This also means that, well... If you are an alien who DOESN'T have FTL capability, then... There is no reason to go on over to some other planet dozens or hundreds of lightyears away to try and invade them.

All of this of course also all assumes that there aren't aliens out there who both have FTL and at least enough similarity to us that they may or may not have put together some form of reasonably good empire/federation/something similar, which has something akin to a prime directive of just leaving humans alone until they advance enough to properly join/be assimilated/otherwise start interacting with the interstellar community. It tends to amuse me that in most sci-fi settings, the aliens rarely if ever make something similar to Star Trek's Federation. Mass Effect kinda did it, but in most settings its the Humans who end up doing this or starting it.
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