Sarah's Scribbles by Sarah Andersen for May 13, 2015

We generally presume that superior civilizations capable of interstellar travel wouldn’t bother coming here, lacking any reason to do so beyond anthropological curiosity, and the journey being prohibitively long.I think that is short-sighted, since there is no reason such a civilization would remain on their birth planet. Planets are dangerous, dirty and unstable, sitting ducks for all manner of disasters. And the riches of the universe are theirs for the taking, without having to deal with a natural gravitational well.We might encounter them once every so often as they were passing through the neighborhood, but otherwise be ignored and left on our own, like Grandparents in a Winnebago who have retired to the road.

A fan of Poorly Drawn Lines?http://poorlydrawnlines.com/comic/intelligent/

The reason they haven’t visited us is because they don’t want any of the stupid to rub off on them.

It’s been suggested (I think by Sagan in “Cosmos”) that mankind radiating out through our entire galaxy, in a method similar to that Polynesians used in the Pacific, would take about 3 million years. That would be if we colonized only Earth-type worlds and terraformed others..However if we adapted humans to worlds, instead of the other way around, things might take only a few tens of thousands. See stories by James Blish related to this:.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seedling_Stars