If you assume energy consumption at current human levels, and a growth rate of ~3% per year (current), it would take ~2,500 years for us to consume all of the stars in the galaxy
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Sophistic musing: if civilizations could expand at exponential rates, rather than sigmoidally (locally) or linearly (long-term), we would have been in touch with aliens by now
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So a single civilization going exponential anywhere in the galaxy at least 2,500 years ago would have consumed our sun by now
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Even taking into account the speed of light as a hard limit on expansion, it would still only take on the order of 100k years -- less than the age of humanity
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"The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us." Quote from Bill Watterson ;-)
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The Fermi Paradox is a thought experiment along these lines. I don’t think it even requires exponential expansion, linear is just fine over astronomical time scales. “Where is everyone?”
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I think this really just means you should take this as saying civilizations just cannot sustain exponential growth
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I always assume that civilizations expand in a locally Gaussian behavior. They curve up and the fall down, sometimes in multiple dimensions. So even a linear growth would assume too much sustained progress for my model.
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Why would this hyper-advanced civilization care about humans or interact with them in any way?
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Maybe aliens are navel-gazing (focused on living in simulations because the real world is just too simple for them).
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Just as *we* are navel-gazing! (Probably all civilisations are, alas. --- Then get to point where space exploration becomes possible. Then terminate themselves before it succeeds. Joy.)
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