Analogous to the Fermi Paradox, if warp drive / time travel are possible, why have I not been visited by someone trying to sell me one?
* you don’t have anything to pay for it with
* your consciousness is the equivalent of an amoeba and it doesn’t occur to anyone to bother
* you are the first, someone has to be
* theres a whole other way to exist, creatures who live in quantum electrodynamics bound reality are boring
* somebody has been and is negotiating, just not you
* everybody eventually lives a billion years, the thousands of years human civilization has existed barely registers, they’ll get around to it after breakfast
* your species isn’t cool enough and nobody wants to be your friend
* your species keeps turning the salesman into a god
* nobody has noticed you yet, it’s a big universe and there’s plenty of other fun things to do
I have wondered if some of Kafka's writings belong in the science fiction genre.
If we even proved it was possible at table top scale I’d be about 99% convinced we are first in at a bare minimum our galaxy.
I would also argue that we should scale it up and get a presence out there fast in case someone less nice than us is also inventing one right now. (And we aren’t all that nice.)
Not under the Zoo hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_hypothesis
Makes me wonder if UFO sightings are from misguided extraterrestrial missionaries trying to teach us about their Lord and Savior Behemecoatyl.
Maybe space is a bit more emptier than you think, and FTL is a bit slower.
Or maybe it is busy, but we haven't waited long enough. I mean think of a native American in the 1400s. If transoceanic travel is possible, why haven't we seen visitors from other continents yet?
Finally, it is still entirely possible that "they" are already there, and there is a cover up. I don't believe it (Occam's razor), but if FTL turns out to be theoretically possible, than I think I will have to update my beliefs :-)
laughs in some 700CE-vintage Polynesian language while munching on a sweet potato