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@nyrath smart enough to measure the rising level of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and know what's causing it.
That'll be a depressing topic of conversation in that system; "we found out were not alone but we were also too late."
#FermiParadox

@Lazarou @nyrath I was working on a story a while ago that combined the Fermi paradox and global warming, but partially in the other direction: see, part of why young civilizations don't see aliens was because the tendency of intelligent life to fry their biosphere before they figured out how to go interstellar, but the other reason was a sort of prime directive: the Space-UN said you weren't allowed within a dozen parsecs of uncontacted species.
But...

@Lazarou @nyrath climate change was such a common method of civilization-death that it was the exception to the isolation rules. So plenty of "we're alone in the universe!" civilizations that were just figuring out that they'd buggered their ecosystem suddenly had a bunch of UFOs showing up and doing mysterious things and oh weird, the climate change problem started fading away, just in time for us to finally solve it permanently with cleaner industry.

@Lazarou @nyrath so space is full of von Neumann probes trying to find uncontacted species so that they can be rescued before they boil themselves, so that in a couple centuries they can naturally join the galactic civilization. So naturally exploration was very important because the worst thing is to find a civilization on a dying planet that you could have fixed, had you just shown up a couple decades earlier, and now it's too late.

@Lazarou @nyrath Anyway the main story was going to be about a group of galactic council races showing up and abducting the entire human civilization, only to drop them on a freshly built habitat on the moon. We're getting a cut-rate ecosystem fix: stuff everyone into an ark on a nearby planetoid while they reboot the whole ecosystem over a couple decades.

@Lazarou @nyrath They found earth almost too late, and then procrastinated on solving our problem because nearly half the council voted "let them burn" because humanity is considered The Virus in galactic circles.
Hundreds of space-faring civilizations, thousands of uncontacted ones, and Humans are the only ones who came up with the concept that you can own ideas.

They nearly let us die because of the dread mind-killer, "copyright"

@Lazarou @nyrath Anyway it was mainly just me finding it hilarious that the real reason for the Fermi paradox might just be that more enlightened alien races find us absolutely disgusting, for minor ideological reasons.

Like, sure, the Beta-Cassiopeians have killed billions, but they've got a locust-style reproductive strategy, they naturally swarm and overwhelm their enemies with sheer numbers... But at least they don't claim ownership on THOUGHT ITSELF!