The Fermi paradox is brutal and sad. Civilizations in the Milky Way more advanced than us us seem vanishingly unlikely. The Milky Way galaxy is only 90,000 light years across. So any civilization that managed to reach our level on a planet orbiting one of the Milky Way’s 100M+ stars more than a million years ago has had more than enough time to spread across our galaxy. Which inexorably leads to the only good explanation for why nobody’s contacted us:
Stardate 10,000,000 BCE, alien Elon Musk: “I’m going to take my quadrillion credits and develop a self-replicating fleet of probes that will spread to all the stars in the Milky Way looking for biosignatures of life, which will then wait for techno signatures from each developing civilization. I need to bring the fruits of my vast intellect and insights on how civilization should be organized to every corner of our galaxy that harbors life.”
Stardate 9,999,990 BCE, alien Elon Musk: “Unfortunately I lost all my credits after purchasing the Zqitter social media network, and have canceled the program.”
