This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Prompted by a comment left by Frank on my last post…

"I make light because I am thoroughly depressed, angry, exhausted, burned out, and numbed by the entire lot of white/christian/conservative/republican/authoritarian/ nazi/hating/lying/cheating/insane/backwards/unreasonable/fucking assholes. And they are not just in this country…it's a world phenomenon."

I quipped back, "And this is why we can't have nice things ANYWHERE."

And probably, I began to think, why we haven't had definitive proof of being visited by extraterrestrials.

I'm sure this has already been posited by minds far greater than mine as an explanation to The Fermi Paradox, but what if all species reach a certain point of development—on the verge of extra-solar space exploration—and poof! they blow themselves up over petty squabbles, god-myths, racial bias, and whatever else they might cause them to separate into an us-versus-them mentality like Man has suffered during most of his existence on this planet. As much as I'd like to think otherwise, maybe one of the hallmarks—nay requisites—of "intelligence" is aggression and competitiveness. I mean it took something to get to the top of the food chain, and having bigger brains certainly contributed to that.

Maybe we haven't been visited—or, considering the vast distances, even heard from anyone else out there yet—is because intelligence never really makes it. Perhaps the galaxy is littered with the corpses of great civilizations that never broke out of their planetary shells, instead turning inward and destroying themselves only to rise and fall again indefinitely. Though not yet widely accepted yet in academic circles, there is certainly mounting evidence that just such a thing has happened on this planet; our current worldwide civilization was not the first—and will not be the last to inhabit this blue marble.

Or as Battlestar Galactica famously proclaimed , "All this has happened before and will happen again."

Of course the other possibility for not having been contacted is that if you are an incredibly advanced, galactic civilization that has mastered most if not all of the laws nature and can manipulate them at will, would you want to make contact with a bunch of continually warring, willfully ignorant apes on a small rock in the backwaters of the Milky Way?