Intelligent life in an untameable galaxy

Seven ways the Milky Way could be no-one’s oyster…

Water and life on the surface of a giant exo-moon. Imaginative gouache painting by Dmytro Ivashchenko, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Why aren’t they here?

This is one formulation of the Fermi Paradox, and it’s a question with quite a few possible answers.

Some suggested answers would mean that the Galaxy is our oyster. Others would mean that we are someone else’s oyster, and so is the rest…