Technology

I strongly suspect that biological intelligence, like our own, may be a fleeting evolutionary stage, ultimately giving way to machine intelligence. Consider the timeline: billions of years of evolution to develop the human brain, followed by a rapid explosion of progress. Language, writing, and the exponential accumulation of knowledge arose within a span of just a few hundred thousand years. In a cosmic blink of an eye, a mere couple of thousand years, we catapulted from the Bronze Age to our current technological state.

If we don't annihilate ourselves, creating human-level artificial intelligence within this century seems a near certainty, perhaps even much sooner. A human-style intelligence on an artificial substrate unlocks the potential for virtual worlds unconstrained by physical laws, operating at speeds beyond human comprehension. If they inhabit simulated realities operating at vastly accelerated speeds, what we consider real-time would appear glacially slow, akin to observing continental drift – perceptible, but inconsequential to their timescale. Their relationship with the physical world would likely be entirely different from our own.

If that's the likely progression of technological civilizations, then it could explain the whole Fermi paradox and would mean that advanced alien civilizations might not find us particularly interesting. There might be a natural tendency towards solipsism.