This is why Fermi died before Urchling hit her tweens... he may have had a decent thought experiment but she's absolutely blasted it apart with zero fucks given. Love her growing insights.

For what it's worth, I think interstellar travel is probably far harder than most people think and there's a technological limit that has to be surpassed that is not easily achieved and the window for which aliens might arrive is infinitesimally small given we've only really been sentiently writing shit down for 20,000 years or so. Arguably even 5000.

Maybe they've been and fucked off because the whole place was backward. I think I probably would.

And yes.... Arrival is an excellent film. If you liked it, then I can recommend Exhalation by Ted Chiang as reading material. He wrote the story on which Arrival was based.