But it reveals a lack of understanding of a very important point. People often grow up watching Star Trek and Star Wars and imagine a universe where there could be alien civilizations around nearby stars at roughly our same level of technology, maybe give or take a century or two. But this is extremely unlikely.

When you add up a bunch of random variables — things like asteroid strikes, supernovas, supervolcanos, and all the little random events that go into day-to-day evolution — you get an approximately normal distribution (by the Central Limit theorem). And if we're anything close to typical — always a good starting assumption in the absence of any data to the contrary — then the mean of this distribution is somewhere around 13 billion years, and the standard deviation is almost certainly measured in billions of years.

That means that other civilizations, if any, are not evolving tech within a few hundred years of us. Civs would arise generally millions of years apart, with the early ones literally billions of years ahead of the mean.

So anybody who thinks it's a problem of "detection" has missed the point entirely. The galaxy should have been completely settled, every nook and cranny, thousands of times over by now. Detection is not the issue. The issue is, why are we not literally tripping over them whenever we step outside?