We’re to primitive to interact with due to missing some critical technology. Like how primitive tribes today would have no idea what radio communication and electricity are, there might be messages flying all around us from alien civs, but we can’t detect them, and they aren’t looking for the radio radiation we put out.
We already know of several critical events that needed to happen for life like us to be here: (short list) the rise of oxygen forcing life to adapt to using it as fuel; a slow deforestation giving time for our ancestors to descend from trees and adapt to living only on the ground, and whatever happened that led to the rise of highly intelligent neanderthalis, denisovand and sapiens apes after a million years of erectus without much change. We know something serious happened, just not what.
There is also filters in front of us. Getting over our addiction to petrochemicals looks to be one, it looks increasingly like internet overreliance might be another. Death of the host star or galactic mergers are things too.
Space is too big to visit in person. Civs exist and persist, but everything is too far apart, FTL either remains fantasy or is so prodigiously expensive it is not worth it on us.
Tied to 2 and 3, civs exist, but are too far apart and don’t last long enough to detect one another. E.g. to get our first radio signals across just our galaxy would be tens of thousands of years. There are billions of galaxies. The earth will be swallowed and die by the sun when the first waves get roughly a third of the way to a far as we can see.
Or:
We’re to primitive to interact with due to missing some critical technology. Like how primitive tribes today would have no idea what radio communication and electricity are, there might be messages flying all around us from alien civs, but we can’t detect them, and they aren’t looking for the radio radiation we put out.
We already know of several critical events that needed to happen for life like us to be here: (short list) the rise of oxygen forcing life to adapt to using it as fuel; a slow deforestation giving time for our ancestors to descend from trees and adapt to living only on the ground, and whatever happened that led to the rise of highly intelligent neanderthalis, denisovand and sapiens apes after a million years of erectus without much change. We know something serious happened, just not what.
There is also filters in front of us. Getting over our addiction to petrochemicals looks to be one, it looks increasingly like internet overreliance might be another. Death of the host star or galactic mergers are things too.
Space is too big to visit in person. Civs exist and persist, but everything is too far apart, FTL either remains fantasy or is so prodigiously expensive it is not worth it on us.
Tied to 2 and 3, civs exist, but are too far apart and don’t last long enough to detect one another. E.g. to get our first radio signals across just our galaxy would be tens of thousands of years. There are billions of galaxies. The earth will be swallowed and die by the sun when the first waves get roughly a third of the way to a far as we can see.