People can make up all kinds of claims that maybe there's some magic reason why other cultures haven't done this, or that they've left this galaxy alone because they're a bunch of interstellar hippies, but every such claim merely makes the outcome less and less probable... particularly as the speed of light makes enforcing such a policy pretty much impossible on a galactic scale. By the time the Hippy Police arrived on the far side of the galaxy to stop people from dismantling stars, the Industrialists would be so powerful that they could wipe out the HPs with ease.
I do not subscribe to the "Hippy Police" theory. I was pointing out the possibility of such a thing happening.
No, as I said, it's possible that we're one of the very first, and that the first only emerged into interstellar space a few thousand years ago. It's just very, very, very, very unlikely.
A rational person doesn't make up unlikely possibilities to support their belief, they look at the evidence and pick the most likely conclusion.
Which is that we're alone.
And, frankly, I find that far more interesting than a galaxy full of Star Trek aliens who are just like humans but with bumps on their heads.
A rational person doesn't eliminate all possibilities and leap to conclusions, or look at a nonbinary problem as a binary one (ie: there are no super-advanced civilizations in the galaxy, therefore there must be no civilizations at all). We don't have enough evidence to reach an informed conclusion. Right now, it's like having microscopes that cannot show objects smaller than 1 inch in diameter, and thereby concluding that there are no objects smaller than 1 inch in diameter.
Keep in mind also that by the time light from the far side of the galaxy reaches us, it's as much as 100,000 years old. When you take into account that window, plus the couple hundred thousand years(as a low estimate) in which a species can be considered intelligent without having marked effects throughout the galaxy, your window of opportunity is suddenly a lot larger than the "few thousand years" you claim. Yes, it's still a split second on the scale of galactic history, but you absolutely cannot claim that nothing of interest has happened in a
hundred BILLION star systems in the course of say 300,000 years.
Moreover, assuming that you are somehow special, or that you belong to a special distinct group of individuals which is somehow innately superior to others (regardless of whether that group is "white males," as in the past, or "all humans," as in the current discussion) is by its very nature a dangerous and invalid way of thinking. Remember, you're unique--just like everyone else.
The odds are that you are
not special, that you are
not the first to do something. Thinking otherwise is just giving yourself a god complex.
You claim: there are no other civilizations out there, in one hundred billion stars.
My claim: there may be another civilization out there, but they are either a) not advanced enough for us to detect or b) too advanced for us to detect, but not so advanced as to make their presence obvious.
Which sounds more likely?
