Trevor, funny, but hardly plausible. And “thousands of years”? That’s like saying the GPU AI machine is currently running close to my feet is getting too warm — I’m going to switch it off for a nanosecond to wait for the room temperature to go down.

But mainly, in any solution to Fermi we must always be able to explain why not a single civilisation, of the probably ten thousand in our galaxy alone, has made the trip. It takes just 20 million years to colonize an entire galaxy, and most civilisations will be a giga-year or more old. If dinosaurs had developed our level of intelligence they would have, by now, visited every planet of the Milky Way. So there is something out there stopping all intelligent lifeforms from undertaking interplanetary travel — or so it would seem.

You might be interested to reading my opinion of why, if NASA (or Musk) find even primitive life forms on Mars, we are doomed! Or my article on what space aliens really look like.