Comment we are the first ones to emerge (Score 4, Interesting) 642
Call it the blurker hypothesis.
Think about it. The universe is maybe 14b years old. Our own planet is about 4b years old. For Earth to form, there had to be a giant dust cloud full of iron and other heavy elements, which can only have come from novae/supernovae. So at least one generation of stars had to form, burn out, explode, cool to ash, and then reform into new gravity wells to form this solar system.
Since this one is about 4b years old, and can be expected to make it another 4b or so, then that leaves a tidy 10b years for a previous star cloud to seed our local region of space. Seems like just enough time.
So we haven't seen other intelligent life yet because we are among the first ones to emerge from the ash...
