Hello there reader. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is not important - it’s one of those strange alien names that can’t be translated into your human language. Human language, after all, has been optimized for communication by your flapping appendages, while mine has been optimized for efficient and understandable data transfer. At least it would take a serious effort, one which I’d rather not make at the present time. Although I am the author of this work, I’m not a main character. The main characters, rather, are the civilizations I shall describe herein.

You see, I’m a traveler, perhaps an explorer, sent by a distant civilization, also of very little importance to you. Yes, I come in peace, with the highest intentions, cook for humans and all that. Indeed if you knew how difficult interstellar warfare would be, you’d realize that you have nothing to fear by way of invasion. And if that’s not enough, the disturbing number of nuclear weapons you psychos keep stockpiled does carry some serious “don’t fuck with us” energy. It’s not that we couldn’t take you. It’s just that you’d be a lot more trouble than you’re worth.

My mission does have to do with Earth, but not Earth in particular. My job is to seek out sentient civilizations throughout the universe, and answer a simple question – what stopped you from becoming interstellar first? For we are the first, and only, interstellar civilization that we’re aware of – and we’re now aware of a lot of space covering thousands of galaxies. Of course after learning about your civilization I’ve found that you have a very similar concept yourselves, called the Fermi Paradox. Not all civilizations do.

But ours is a bit more advanced, due to the fact that we’ve developed long-distance teleportation technology, which makes the question all the more baffling. For a very long time, we assumed that the solution to the paradox was that faster than light travel was impossible, making interstellar travel and certainly intergalactic travel difficult to practically impossible. And as far as we know, moving faster than light is impossible. However, the discovery of semi-practical instantaneous teleportation made it obvious that, though expensive, even intergalactic distances can be covered in a very short amount of time, even if it’s not exactly “traveling”.

I won’t bore you with too many of the details, which you wouldn’t understand anyway because you’ve yet to discover the entire branch of physics it’s based on. But essentially the only speed limitation is the fact that I must make some reasonable effort to discern what’s in my path. I can only teleport to completely empty space, sparing maybe a few neutrinos. Of course, I don’t know where I’m going exactly until I get there, because the light I see in advance is limited by – you guessed it, the speed of light. But I can infer with my star computers where the planets will be, as well as by guessing based on what I can see now. The shorter the jump distance, the more likely I’m right. So rather than just jumping to another galaxy, I first jump tp a spot some distance from the galaxy, then jump closer and closer to my intended destination within it in a serious of jumps. If I make a mistake, well, at least I’ll go quickly. But we’ve gotten pretty good at playing the odds so that the chances of errors are very small, certainly no worse than taking a road trip with one of your ground cars.

But as you can imagine, this sort of process, combined with the difficulty of miniaturizing the teleportation drive in size or expense, makes teleportation poorly suited for two-way communication. Therefore it’s necessary that for at least the teleportation jumps, I’m physically being teleported myself. However upon getting closer to my destination, I much prefer to sent out drones from a safe distance. So while I’m near you, at least in cosmological terms, I’ve yet to set foot on your planet with my own body, nor will I.

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Which brings me to why I’m writing this. You might imagine that maybe I’m here to warn you about some future harm that might befall your society. But I’m not. As you can see, this writing is clearly represented as a work of fiction, and if I were trying to be convincing, that would hardly be a way to do it. Rather, given the mild but very real dangers of long-distance teleportation and the problems with sending records back home, there’s a concern that a simple mistake could result in my discoveries, along with whatever knowledge is stored within my own memory, being lost entirely in a brilliant flash of light. So it seems prudent to create a backup whenever I can. And your civilization, which happens to be in the phase of having an internet that isn’t yet taken over by a central power for mind control, is the perfect place to create such a backup. So I don’t care if you take any lessons from this, and quite frankly your civilization seems to have little capability to avoid forewarned catastrophes anyway. All I want is to make a record that some future explorer might discover should I fail to make it back home.

Oh but why is this purportedly a work of fiction? Well, the bureaucrats at home have decided it would be unwise for some reason to have a lowly traveler like myself make first contact, so I’m required to add some sort of plausible deniability about me being an actual traveler from another galaxy. I figure that claiming this is fiction suffices.

But anyway, your Fermi Paradox is now settled. The answer to the question “Where is everyone?” is right here where I sit, just outside the orbit of your moon. My civilization beat yours to interstellar travel, suck on it. But my equivalent paradox is unsettled. Mine is still the only interstellar civilization, and no, you definitely don’t count. Many civilizations I’ve encountered have gotten to managing a few space missions like you, but few go much beyond, and those that do progress further inevitably fail somewhere not far down the line.

As for why, I’m afraid I don’t have a single, easy answer But in summary, here’s what I’ve discovered: first, life is widespread in the universe. The vast majority of habitable planets that have existed for at least a billion years have some form of permanent and at least semi-complex life. However, consciousness doesn’t arise nearly as frequently as your society seems to expect. For some reason you seem to think consciousness is explicable by what you call Newtonian physics - which is, frankly, hilarious. It’s far more difficult and exotic of a process. Nevertheless, it does occasionally arise - but in all cases where it has arisen, it has failed to expand civilization beyond the local solar system. Typically civilization only lasts a short time, on cosmological scales. Sometimes it lasts longer. But in all cases but my own, there seems to have been a ceiling on the advancement of the species.

However, there has never been one reason for it. In fact, every society I’ve come across that developed civilization has had a different reason for its collapse or stagnation. In the chapters that follow, I’ll examine them, one by one.

Oh, and I’m sure you’re wondering – what about Earth? Well your civilization is still advancing, obviously, so I can’t conclude anything about you yet. But do I think you’ll make it? Let’s see – no. First, the base rate tells me it’s very unlikely. Second, your civilization shows some familiar signs – as well as some unfamiliar ones – of a civilization vulnerable to decline. Maybe I’ll tell you more someday, but probably not. Because again, I don’t actually care about your civilization. There’s lots of probably doomed civilizations just like yours throughout the universe. And I really don’t have the mental or emotional capacity to give a fuck about watching your civilization squander its future, as you almost inevitably will.

But hey, maybe if you take responsibility for your own fate, however unlikely that is, you’ll read on and learn something from the chapters that follow. Then it’ll be up to you to do something with that knowledge.

So let’s get started.