Quote Originally Posted by Steely Glint View Post
We *are* one of the first races out of the gate; the universe is only 14 billion years old and most models of the ultimate fate of the universe have it remaining this way for at least tens of billions and possibly trillions more. Assuming those models are correct, we're in a very young universe.
Looked at that way, sure. But I meant that it's been billions of years since life such as ours should have been possible. Our star formed a few billion years later that a star like it could have, and we took a couple billion years longer evolving than we theoretically could have. So if sapient life is common, then there should be races in the galaxy with a couple billion years head start on us, more than enough time to fill it at even a sluggish pace.

The more I think about it the more sense it makes, our science has already begun shown us that the reality we perceive in our day to day lives and the reality as it actually exists are not the same thing, and questions such as why the universe exists and is the way it is are currently completely beyond us; it makes sense that as a civilisation advances in knowledge over a period of millions of years they will come to understand our reality in ways we cannot even comprehend and will, presumably, also develop technology anchored in that understanding.
A singularity or a vastly different way of life would probably be a perfectly good reason not to head out into the stars. Why colonize the galaxy when you can hop into a pocket universe instead, or you're all uploaded to an infinite capacity mainframe housed in a microsingularity, or you can make TARDISes arbitrarily bigger on the inside? Or some explanation that no human is even capable of thinking of.

An related idea is that intersteller colonisation *is* a good idea until you reach a certain point of development at which point it stops becoming a worthwhile endeavour. This may happen in fits and starts. For example:

* Interseller colonisation is current theoretically possible but very expensive so not worthwhile
* Technology develops; now it's worthwhile because it's cheaper and we're running out of living space
* A few hundred years later and now technology has developed to the point where we can build things like Halos/Culture orbitals and other elaborate megastructures to live on, so we don't need to expand into other stellar systems for more living space; we still do it sometimes just for the hell of it but there's no massive push to expand as there was in previous eras and expansion slows to a crawl
* Thousands of years later our society is so fantastically advanced we now need dyson spheres to meet our energy needs so we have to start expanding other stars again to meet our resource needs.
* Perhaps a million years on we're now so advanced we can now manipulate reality itself and everyone just moves into the giant Tardis we made
For the record, I wrote my TARDIS example before I read yours

This actually works I think. As long as colonization has constraints, it'd fit without resorting to low-probability scenarios while still allowing relatively common sapience.