If I were an extraterrestrial, I might be very cautious about communicated my location to the rest of the universe since the universe might be full of other hostile extraterrestrials. This is an argument which must scare the bejebus out of those working on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). And this begs the question: is there a way to transmit a signal such that the location of the transmitter cannot be discovered? In this 2003 article by Walter Simmons and Sandip Pakvasa, the authors claim that it is possible to design such a protocol by using entangled photons. Now I haven’t fully understood their protocol, but I do worry that it requires the transmitters to bounce their entangled photons off of relay stations which make a large angle on the reciever’s sky. And if you can create a large angle on the reciever’s sky, why don’t you just send a signal from somewhere where you don’t have any of your cute little alien colonies?
O brave new quantum world!
Life may be common in the universe, but not intelligent life.
If there are other intelligent civilizations in our universe, they too would have had the same problem of detecting any other civilizations around them, with greater than one thousand to ten thousand light years away from their home planet.
The odds that any advanced civilization would put a safety beacon in space, so they would not divulge their true location would be stupid, because there would be nobody even around to view the beacon in any kind of serious time line.
Intelligent life is too rare to play the stupid game of hostile extraterrestrials waiting to overtake their neighbor that would be over a thousand light years away.
If it were hostile extraterrestrials, by the time their ships get there, the home planet would have had time to defend against their attack, which would make any attack from another inteligent planet impossible.