Something to think about:
“Modern radio telescopes are exquisitely sensitive; a distant quasar is so faint that its detected radiation amounts perhaps to a quadrillionth of a watt. The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground. In detecting the cosmic background radiation, in counting quasars, in searching for intelligent signals from space, radio astronomers are dealing with amounts of energy that are barely there at all.”
-Carl Sagan
Fourteen Twenty 