And that's why they won't find anything, IMHO. Anyone who spends five minutes thinking about the consequences of deliberately transmitting interstellar beacon signals will conclude that the only safe, sane thing to do is STFU.

At the same time, no advanced civilizations will be using coherent RF communications that stand out from the noise floor, because it makes little sense to keep doing that once your civilization understands information theory.

Still, SETI was an undeniably cool thing to try, and I'm glad they did. Lots of other cooperative-computing tasks grew out of the same idea as the article mentions.