On: What If We Haven’t Met Aliens yet Because They’ve ...

[dsfyu404ed]

>The galaxy is populated, much like Earth. The power controlling our region has a policy of leaving us alone. End of story.

Or they just don't care to visit our solar system because there's nothing of interest here. I'm sure you can imagine a 18th century European surveyor sailing past a bunch of new islands, noting them on charts and tossing in the description "contains no resources" and then moving on.

[narag → dsfyu404ed]

Travel might be terribly expensive and slow even for advanced species, so the concept of "resources" would be meaningless.

Or maybe they've come, but only in very small numbers. They radio home and leave for the next system to explore.

[incompatible → dsfyu404ed]

Such as when Abel Tasman explored Australia and New Zealand in 1642, but didn't find anything of interest (trade opportunities) to the rulers in Europe of the time.

If we assume that an advanced civilization will develop machine intelligence on a large scale with efficient processors and vast energy resources, it's possible that they've already fully explored the nature of worlds such as ours, and they don't have any reason to monitor them further.

[DougN7 → dsfyu404ed]

What if they have visited, a long long time ago. The lead explorer’s name happened to be “God”.

[BurningFrog → dsfyu404ed]

Fermi's counter argument is that there's been billions of years.

Even a slow moving star hopping civilization should have spread across the whole galaxy many times over by now.

The 18th century surveyor skipped some islands, sure. But by now they're all accounted for.