Quote Originally Posted by Wraith View Post
They are being used, they're just not being detonated. They cannot possibly be replaced by swords, no matter how big - swords just can't hope to accomplish the same things.

Also, I was trying to steer it towards "bombs" and not just nukes because you really need to see the full suite of what were doing instead of medieval weapons for the comparison. But we're already pretty far off track here now.
Distant observers (in space or time) would not have access to the full suite of what we are doing, just like we don't have access to the full suite of what the KIC guys are up to.

The first one seems pretty unlikely, as if intelligent life were only now emerging into the universe but was doing so in large numbers it would mean we're one of the first races out of the gate.
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.

It would mean there's nothing special about our evolutionary history, except that we were faster at it than most. I guess maybe it's true, but damn that'd make us incredibly lucky.
It doesn't necessarily make us the first or even close to the first, it just lowers the amount of time in which other intelligent races can potentially have been kicking around out there quit drastically (from billions down to millions); therefore potentially explaining the lack of evidence we see for them.

I can't come up with any strong objections to the second at the moment, as it's stated.
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.

Some could leak out of their systems, as long as they figure out that it's a mistake before they get too many generations into it. If it stays a good idea in the long term for even one civilization, we get back to the problem of how the galaxy should be filled, but if colonization is anomalous whenever it happens, a mistake that gets fixed or contained, then we can have a populated galaxy with our system still being uncolonized.
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