system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Now that we have a much larger catalogue of where there are planets in the goldilocks zone, wouldn't that help SETI or other endeavors searching for intelligent life?
gpt
It might give them something to point at, but would not dramatically increase the chance that we get a signal generated by alien life. Let's say we find a planet in the Goldilocks zone that's 5 million light years away. So we swing our radio 'scopes to point at it and listen to see if we can catch an alien signal. 

Let's further assume that there is an alien civilization there right now, with its own SETI, and they've found Earth, and just pointed *their* scopes at us. What will they get? They'll get what humans were emitting 5 million years ago, which is to say, absolutely nothing. If they were to then conclude "Oh well, guess there's no intelligent life on Earth," they'd be making the error of assuming that Earth's occupants were in the same technological state 5 million years ago as we are today. 

In short, we not only have to listen to the right *place,* but we also have to be listening at the right *time.*  For all we know, the planet we're pointing at 5 million light years away had a fantastically advanced civilization 6 million years ago that for whatever reason is no longer there now (now being, of course, 5 million years ago). Or it might have had a civilization 5 million years ago, but that civilization just invented the wheel and therefore wasn't radiating anything. And whatever it's radiating now, we have to wait 5 million years to receive. In short, SETI is up against some tall odds. Finding any signal at all would be a pretty amazing thing, even if the universe is, averaging over time and distance, absolutely bursting with intelligent life.