Chances of aliens finding Earth disappearing?

"A pioneer of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has warned that for any intelligent aliens trying to search for us, "the Earth is going to disappear" very soon. Frank Drake's point, made at a SETI workshop at Harvard University on Friday, is that television services are increasingly being delivered by technologies that do not leak radio frequencies into space. But he added that in some ways the observation is good news for SETI, as it means that the failure of Earth-based observers to detect aliens so far may be less worrisome than it would otherwise seem."



This is an excerpt from an article at NewScientist.com . I've always wondered whether there really were aliens. My father believes in them, he believes crop circles are formed by them (oh, and he's seen too many Steven Spielberg movies). There was a time, when I was a little kid, I used to think there were aliens in outer space. But do I still believe?



I'm not sure I have enough experience in these matters. There are so many people in several countries across the world, who claim all this to be hogwash. But there are an equal number of people who do believe. And of course, there are these few people who don't actually believe but claim to have seen a UFO, just for the sake of publicity.



The basic science taught to me in my school days only included our solar system, consisting of the 9 planets. In recent times, NASA has successfully landed their rover on Mars, and it doesn't seem like there are any advanced life-forms. And even with the International Space Station and other advanced telescopic devices, there has been no record of any such "alien" activity.



But the universe consists of several systems like ours, and nobody knows how many; though Frank Drake might. For he has developed an equation for estimating the number of detectable intelligent civilizations on other worlds. But that isn't my topic, so I'll deal with it later.



So how do we know for sure? Probably, we would have to wait for them to contact us, if they exist. Or we could wait for NASA and other leading space organizations to give us the details... maybe not. For government aided space organizations may already have knowledge of existing life-forms other that ours in outer space, and may be hiding it from us, for reasons only they know.



In the end, back to my question to myself... do I believe? Do I choose to believe? I don't know. If the Oracle from the Matrix were here, she would have probably told me that I've already made that choice, and I only have to understand it. Hmm... I think I'm bad at understanding things...