I'm not comfortable with "hundreds of thousands" of civilizations. I feel like I'm being potentially overly expansive when I say "hundreds", full stop.

With an estimated 100 billion planets in the Milky Way, I'm willing to believe in easily dozens, if not hundreds, of concurrent civilizations. But space is really, really big - without some comic book level FTL, each civilization will never meet the other, and without some amazing coincidence, may never be at the same…

And that's why the sky is an solid sheet of starlight, because of all that time light's had to travel.

He gave Hitler a Rusty Venture.

I don't THINK there are any women in The Day After Tomorrow.

He, uh, did.

Exploding national monuments.

Star density in our neck of the woods is laughably spacious. A civilization in one of the Milky Way's 150 globular clusters would only have to travel approximately 1,000 AU to reach the nearest star, while we Earthicans have to travel 275,000 AU to get to the nearest star, which is a pretty disappointing binary system.

It's not even real magic.

We're kind of in a bit of a stellar desert where we are. They don't even have to be deliberately keeping things from us - said confederation may just assume that since our patch of galaxy is such a shithole, there clearly couldn't be any civilizations in it, so they don't bother looking.

The Milky Way is 100,000 years in diameter. A civilization could have arisen, colonized half a dozen planets, and died out entirely before we'd even figured out this whole agriculture thing, and any signals they sent out STILL not have had time to reach us. God forbid if they're on the other side of the central bulge…

Currently, not a particularly profitable line of research.

I really really want FTL to be possible, but stupid physicists keep confirming that killjoy Einstein over and over again.

I'd LIKE to take mass transit more often, but apparently nobody cares if you'd like to go from one city to another city by bus or light rail, so I end up driving more often than not.

We have no idea what the conditions are like on any but the most extreme of those exoplanets. There is literally no way (right now) that we could tell if Kepler 422b is covered in screaming space lizards, especially if they haven't entered their own space age.

The problem with the Fermi Paradox is that it assumes a) alien signaling will be in a format we recognize, b) sent at a time we're listening, b1) in that format, c) that we're listening at the right place, and d) aliens WANT to contact/visit us.

All speculation on xenolife is made on a sample size of 1. That's not even anecdotal evidence! Until and unless we can either visit other worlds, or until and unless we receive an unmistakable signal from another world, we're just making up numbers and calling other people idiots for not having made up the same…

That's as ludicrous an assertion as finding Jesus in your french toast.

Has it come to this? We're letting a GERMAN pass judgment on us now?

Correct!