Contacting Aliens

Let me just bounce this off Hanson's post about the probability that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the galaxy, on 100 or so planets.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that this is true. The dilemma is this: if aliens live on another planet in our galaxy, and drive their alien-cars to their alien-work and read the alien-news and occasionally blast radio waves into space in hopes that other aliens (us) will detect it, and if they are 40,000 light years away (relatively close in galactic terms - the Milky Way is 100,000 or so light years in diameter) we won't detect their radio waves they are sending today for another 40,000 years, by which time their alien civilization may be long gone, or conversely ours might be as well.
So the usual end argument of astrobiologists and their dissenters is that "even if alien civilizations are a statistical certainty in the Milky Way Galaxy, its pointless to consider First Contact because it will not occur in any reasonable amount of time due to the size constraints of the galaxy."
A corollary argument is this: modern humans have lived on this planet for 200,000 years or so, and before that protohumans lived on this planet for 3 million years. Before that, life evolved in one form or another for a few billion years. And our star has existed for about 4.5 billion years. We've had the ability to broadcast radio waves for about 100 years. So if an alien race were to have looked at the Sun for our radio waves (the way the SETI program looks at other stars for alien radio waves) they would have a 1/45,000,000 chance, or 0.000000225% chance of looking at Sol during the radio-broadcast-era of our solar system. Certainly, as our civilization continues the length of time we've been barfing radio broadcasts into space increases, but it still remains a tiny percentage. So aliens, in all likelihood, have looked at our solar system in their own SETI program and simply missed us - we're too new to the intergalactic game. Flip that around and realize that the chances we will see alien radio broadcasts in our SETI programs is incredibly slim. Winning lottery ticket slim, really.

Worse yet, who is to say that humans will use radio-wave-based data transmission forever? What if the natural evolution of an Intelligent Civilization in the universe is to evolve large brains, master fire, build agriculture, harness silicon, spend a couple hundred years wirelessly transmitting via radio waves, and then discovering an even better method of wireless information broadcast and abandoning radio waves completely. The results would be that if this held true for other civilizations, searching for alien radio waves would be an even more ridiculous 1-in-a-zillion. We'd have to catch their broadcasts during their short radio-wave episode of their Intelligent Civilization.

So what communication system would an advanced civilization (either ours or an alien) use to communicate? It certainly seems logical that radio waves of sufficient strength can fulfill all the information broadcast requirements of a single-planet-inhabiting civilization, but what if humans colonize Mars? A 9.5 minute delay between every signal is a frustrating. Then imagine we send colonists deeper into space, having discovered other "M-class" planets. Radio signals to/from them would take weeks to travel through space.
So a faster-than-light communication method seems the only plausible thing.

Suspend judgement, dear reader! I understand the surreality of concepts involving "faster than light" anything, but for the sake of argument I want us to assume that sufficient advances in gravitational control as well as increasing harnessing of energy sources allows one to produce an artificial method for transmitting data faster-than-light.
So here's the thing: if we imagine that future-humans will develop some sort of FTL data transmission method, I think we need to figure out some candidate methods that would work, then try to detect the data from those. If radio transmission is a dead end, which I think it will be in a couple centuries, we need to start imagining what the next thing will be. We don't have to develop the ability to transmit data...just to hear the transmissions being sent around the Galaxy by advanced alien civilizations.
Think of it like this: we're Native Americans, sending smoke signals, and the advanced aliens in our galaxy are the Post Office riders. We do not need to build our own postal system and then exchange mail with the alien post riders: we just need to figure out what is in those riders' satchels and intercept the mail.

I dunno, ya know? It's a long shot, but then again, so is everything when it comes to the Galaxy.

_