Quote:
Originally posted by ubertuber
Don't forget that the amount of time that humans have been aware enough to even know that we've been contacted is only in the tens/low hundreds of thousands of years. When you consider the distances between star systems (and therefor how long or difficult intersystem travel would be) you realize that we haven't been open for business for all that long. So, our supposition that we don't know of any contact (and I'm not really endorsing the people that claim prehistorical contact hidden in mythology or religion) doesn't tell you much. Someone could easily have missed us by 10,000 years...
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Granted, but the paradox doesn't refer to contact, but rather the very presence, which should have come through every habitable system in the form of Von Neumann colonization or some other exponentially branching method of distribution. Given even that only ten civilizations have matured enough to expand beyond their solar system, at least one of those ten should have left a reverberating mark, based on what we can safely assume about the sociologal requirements of such a group.