For the Conspiracy Theorists Out There...

[Zzzptm]

... it may well be, as I just dealt with a potential spam call. I need to pick up the phone when it rings because of my job. But I don't say hello if I don't recognize or expect the number. I wait for the other party to do so. Gen Z is right to answer calls with silence, cuts down on the spam/scam interactions.

SCI-FI story idea: a civilization discovers many signals of other civilizations, but makes no response because of their history... they still shudder as they remember The Great Spamming of millennia ago, when they contacted another civilization that proceeded to bombard them with advertising, scams, and crypto schemes. Never again, they vow... never again...

And what if the aliens *do* walk among us, collecting marketing info for a beverage they make that they want to compete head-to-head with Coca-Cola? Yikes!

[Typhon]

I agree, it's realistic to know of the extremely slim chances of contacting another set of life forms, even if they're given to space-faring.

Add to that the question of whether it's wise to make a signal or to respond to one - how does one know the intentions of the other life forms? Is it safer to just be quiet and not draw attention - or to seek out potential destroyers?

Is the Great Silence... intentional?

I hadn't thought of that angle.  Although, I've never been all that concerned about there existing another intelligent life form having the ability to dominate the human race.  Sure it's possible, but I think most of those ideas stem from paranoid imaginations.

[Zzzptm]

"paranoid imaginations" - I'd like to plug Phil K. Dick's novella, "Clans of the Alphane Moon" for a fun twist on paranoia and other mental disorders and how they save a colony. Except depression. That one doesn't do much saving... not much of a spoiler, that one...

The "intentional Great Silence" line of thinking comes out of a bit of game theory. Assume a civilization that can master time and space and is capable of things that stagger us as much as calculus is incomprehensible to a kindergartener. Does this advanced civilization see other intelligent life as potential competition that should be destroyed? If that's a possibility, then one would have to assume that exists as a possible strategy in a game of contact and that not revealing one's civilization to such a power would improve one's own civilization's chances of long-term survival.

One such scenario is brought forward in the Berserker series of sci-fi stories that Fred Saberhagen kicked off and gave permission for other authors to use the concept, characters, and milieu in their works. Phil Dick did his own take on killer robots in his story "Second Variety" that's a real chiller of a tale.