Reply #30: No, not for a book

[Occulus]

Although the concept appears (as I know you know) in a great many science fiction novels. I personally liked Stephen Baxter's proposition in one of his "Manifold" novels: that every so often there's a gamma ray burster that drives all life in the galaxy back to the level of pond scum, and that's why FTL travel hasn't ever been invented... no species can survive long enough to get that far.

He had another thought, too: as a civilization expands through space, the pressure from the core of the civilization for resources and real estate becomes so great that the wavefront of colonization must at some point approach c, making further meaningful colonization impossible, which then leads to extinction.

What I was suggesting was that even if such colonization/FTL travel had taken place throughout our galaxy, it doesn't necessarily exist concurrently with our own species. It could have happened, and been over with, a million+ years ago. Of course, we're not talking about other pressures on a species, such as disease, war, 'bad' genetic engineering, cosmic disasters, etc. All those factors would play a role in species survival as well.

I guess I just don't buy the "if they were there, we would see them" argument. There are just too many reasons for that to not necessarily be true.