Science fact and Science fiction

[Agent Miles]

Most of the cool scientists at SETI and in the Exobiology departments will tell your children that 100,000 intelligent alien races may inhabit the universe. Even if they have an extraordinary understanding of the Drake equation, that might be a very lonely place. The "Hubble Bubble" with the volume of the observable universe centered on the Earth contains about 300,000 billion, billion, billion cubic light years of space. So if we are statistically lucky, we may have an intelligent neighbor within our 3 billion, billion, billion cubic light year zone. Yaaay (sarcasm off).

That may seem daunting, however, time is on our side. The universe is 13.72 billion years old. Galaxies formed within a half billion years after the Big Bang. Giant stars in those galaxies were rapidly fusing hydrogen into heavier elements. After only a few million years these stars with hundreds of times the mass of the Sun were going super nova. The heavier elements that make up life were created in the explosions and spread throughout the surrounding hydrogen clouds. The shock waves created smaller stars like our's. If some of these stars evolved like ours (physics led to chemistry led to biology), then intelligent creatures might have populated them by 5 billion years after the BB. So beings like us should statistically have existed 8 billion years ago. That would give them time enough to colonize everything in that 3 bn, bn, bn cubic light year space. Either interstellar space travel is totally impossible or they should have found us. They wouldn't be visitors. The Sun would be part of their turf. Our ancestors would have been able to look up and see the alien's Dyson ring around the Sun.

Perhaps, the most intelligent members of any advanced species eventually discover technology that the most foolish members of their species use to cause their extinction.