Martin,

   You lost me with the first sentence. What is an "advanced civilization"? 
What is an "advanced technology"? When you start off from undefined but cool 
sounding buzzwords it is easy to reason (badly) to just about any 
conclusion. I'm not sure of the relation to SETI which claims to be 
searching for "intelligence" ( another undefined buzzword ).
   Is this Kurzweil from MIT? Is the book any good?

Dave M