While some contend that there could exist extraterrestrial civilizations that have been around for a billion years and therefore a billion years more advanced than us, others stand by the Fermi Paradox which asserts if they were out there we would have heard from them.
If there are old civilizations out there, I wonder what one billion year generation iPhones look like.
Fermi reasoned, if there are other advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, then why is there no evidence of such, like spacecraft or probes floating around the Milky Way. His question became famously known as the Fermi Paradox. The paradox is the contradiction between the high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and yet the lack of evidence for, or contact with, any such civilizations.
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There is a possibility that the galaxy is the equivalent of a forest at night and we are something small and young squeaking away in the open when we should be hiding under a log until we know what we might find out there.....
My other take on the issue is that we are measuring these things by our own time span, what if the such lifeforms were born, grown and died in days, yet still found a way to conciousness and their evolutionary zenith? Maybe they have come and gone, there are no gaps, because there is no parallel to us.