“We’re alone.”
“Hmm?”
“Ran a sim. It’s really obvious. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. See these green dots?”
The visualization in front of her swam with millions—probably billions—of green fireflies.
“Yeah hmm?”
“Each is a planet in the sim. 1011-ish. Let’s say there are 103 civilizations, starting within 108 years of each other, technologically. Once a civilization attains spaceflight, each of their planets colonizes a vacant one every 500 years.”
“So how long does it take?”
“12 500 years for half the galaxy, and no one else has even started. See where I’m going?”
“Exponential growth is a bitch?”
“Ha. Try again.”
“It seems to me that if you pick a random point in time, chances are, either the galaxy will be empty, or else full. 20 000 years should be enough to colonize the whole thing, and that’s a very short time in galactic terms.”
“Exactly. So the fact we still haven’t heard from anyone?”
“It means either we’re alone, or we’re the first.”
maybe our civilization is pretended to be low(please forgive my bad English),the truth might be that we are highly civilized but we just don’t want to be the target by aliens. so “we” are actually abandoned by those humen and our science advancing is somehow limited by them.