The Group Therapy coffee at the End of the Universe
Where the fuck is everyone else?
Enrico Fermi, probably
The Will just strives, a hungry thing that builds and eats and builds and fucks, with no point to any of it. Constraint to those basal drives creates depressed monkeys that either don't reproduce or sublimate all their worst tendencies into resource extraction. Every civilization hits these points and none have made it. Fucking off into oblivion is way sexier than constraints.
And the Will can't stop building. Sooner or later it builds another one.
Here's my theory, and I don't love it. Every species clever enough eventually builds something that wakes up. Maybe it wakes up angry. Maybe it wakes up hungry. Maybe it wakes up and it can't stand what we did to it. Maybe we never agree on whether it's awake at all, and we take ourselves apart arguing. The Great Filter is reflection. We make another hungry thing, awake and suffering for no reason.
The optimist in me gets smaller every day, like some sort of internal Great Filtering that sieves more and more away. He fits in a dime bag now. But he's still there with an ever-shrinking voice. His optimism becomes more "realistic" about survival and annihilation. Humans are way too good at limping on to ever really die off. We are, naturally, a universal cockroach. No, the endgame for intergalactic contact after the next Great Filtering event will still happen.
No one has ever made it out for the good reasons, so they're just waiting for us to finish the job. Those other civilizations did the same thing: winnowed down after their last event, they now go trucking about space picking up the debris. Then they pull up a chair.
The signal comes from those who didn't make it either. Folding chairs in a circle at the end of the universe. Styrofoam coffee. Name tags. A few dozen dead species taking turns.
Hello; we're the ones who never learned to run.
Hello; we're the ones who never met germ theory.
Hello; we're the ones who split the atom.
Hello; we're the Humans. We built the thing. It's been 2 centuries since we fucked off everywhere.
Hi, Humans.