I think an alien race would have to be super advanced or super lucky to find our corner of the galaxy. It's like looking through a 100 mile piece of rolled up paper to "look for" intelligent life. Then there's the whole radio/IR spectrum thing. The signal would be severely degraded and who says they'd use similar technology to communicate? Meanwhile, our solar system's astroid fields supposedly have trillions of dollars worth of resources inside.
There is someone, at MIT(I think, might be one of the ivy league schools) who has a machine that can send a laser or particles or something backwards faster than the speed of light. He leaves it on, and continues to work on sending larger things backwards because that is how people can go backwards in time. It is kind of like superman flying the opposite way than they earth is spinning. Anyway is idea is that someone from the future will come back, but it isn't possible to send anything back to before that machine was on, because that was when particles were first beamed the other way etc. He leaves it on all the time waiting for something or someone from the future to come back. It was pretty interesting. it was on Natl. Geographic, or Discovery science or one of those channels. It was a while back which is while I am so fuzzy at it(along with a limited knowledge base to start with on my part.) But if you see anything about it, it is worth watching.
The original light faster-than-light experiment was possible because of a bit of a misunderstanding. c = speed of light in a vacum The experiment works because it sends the light through something that isn't a vacum (I don't remember what). Beyond that, quantum entanglement transmits spin state information instantly from one particle to another no mater the physical location. If you flip a quantum-entangled particle on one side of the universe, it's partner instanly flips on the other side. Einstein called this "spooky action at a distance". It is not disproven that one could travel back in time by way of a closed, timelike curve one could then go faster than light and upon reaching the destination go back in time to when one wanted to appear.
