For as long as we’ve imagined life beyond Earth, we’ve assumed one thing without question: we arrived late.
We picture ancient empires among the stars, civilizations millions of years older, building Dyson spheres while we were knapping flint. Even science leans that way. The universe is nearly 14 billion years old. Earth is young by comparison. Surely someone else got here first.
But a growing number of scientists are exploring a very different idea, one that flips the Fermi Paradox on its head:
What if the universe is quiet because no one else has made it this far yet?
What if we are the first?
The Silence Isn’t Empty, It May Be Young
The classic Fermi Paradox asks:
“If intelligent alien life exists, where is everyone?”
We’ve scanned thousands of exoplanets, listened for transmissions, searched for megastructures, irregular light signatures, and artefacts of stellar engineering.
The result?
Silence. No signals. No ruins. No shadows of empires.
Traditional explanations blame distance, extinction, self-destruction, or the dangers of being found. But there is a simpler possibility:
No one else has had time to evolve yet.
Consider:
- The galaxy is about 13 billion years old.
- Earth-like planets with heavy elements and stable conditions only became common in the last few billion years.
- Complex life on Earth took roughly four billion years to emerge.
- Technological intelligence is less than 100,000 years old, a cosmic flicker.
Maybe we are not late. Maybe we are exactly on time.
And maybe most planets haven’t had enough time to produce anyone else.
Someone is always first. There is no rule saying it cannot be us.
We Are Used to Thinking Small
There is comfort in believing we are junior members of the cosmos. If we arrived late, someone else came before us and did the heavy lifting: explored, failed, or destroyed themselves long before we lit our first fire.
But there is a far more unsettling possibility:
Humanity may not be the galaxy’s teenager. We may be its eldest child.
What if, when future civilizations arise, we are the old ones in the sky, the forerunners, the ones the myths are written about?
Fiction Rarely Dares to Ask This
Most science fiction imagines ancient ruins, dead empires, or warnings left behind by civilizations that rose and fell long before us. We expect to find their ghosts because we assume they existed.
But a quieter idea is gaining ground, both in science and in story:
What if there are no ruins because we will be the ones to leave them?
In Return to the Galaxy, humanity begins as forgotten, overlooked, even dismissed. Then the truth cuts through the silence. Earth may not be an afterthought. It may be the spark no one expected.
The question changes. It is no longer “Where is everyone else?”
It becomes “What if we are the beginning?”
Being First Is Not Fortune, It Is Responsibility
If no other intelligent species has risen yet, then our choices matter far more than we realise.
If we wipe ourselves out, we might not just end humanity. We might erase the first intelligent civilization in the galaxy before it ever builds, teaches, or travels.
If we survive and expand, then millions of future species may grow in the light, or the shadow, of our decisions.
We could be:
- The first explorers
- The first empire builders
- The first to create artificial intelligence
- The first to seed other worlds
- The first legend - or the first warning
Picture a world ten million years from now. A young species stares at the sky and whispers about something ancient and unseen. They may not be imagining visitors from the past. They may be imagining us.
What If We’re Not Late Bloomers, but Early Gods?
The Fermi Paradox asks why we do not see anyone else.
Maybe the better question is this:
What if no one else is here yet because we are the ones who go first?
Maybe we are not stepping into someone else’s abandoned halls.
Maybe we are laying the first stones.
Maybe we are the civilization others will one day discover, envy, or fear.
In Return to the Galaxy, powerful forces make a dangerous mistake. They assume humanity is irrelevant; a relic on a forgotten world. But being overlooked is not the same as being unimportant. The galaxy had not passed us by. We were simply earlier than anyone realised.
So, I will leave you with this thought:
What if we are not the stragglers of the cosmos, but the first voices in the dark?
What if we are not late bloomers, but early gods?
A Huge Thank You, You Made This Happen
I want to take a moment to say a genuine thank you to everyone who picked up Explore the Galaxy during launch week, and especially to anyone who has been with us since the very start. Your early support has made an incredible difference, and we have achieved far more than I hoped for when Book 1 came out on June 18th.
Earlier this week, I checked the Amazon UK charts and had one of those surreal moments where you have to look twice. Return to the Galaxy reached number one in multiple categories, including Colonisation, Space Fleet, Space Marines, Alien Invasion, and Genetic Engineering. Even more surprising, and honestly quite moving, was seeing all four books sitting at number one, four, seven, and eight in the Alien Invasion category. That is the top ten in one of the biggest sci-fi genres, less than four months after the first book was launched.
It is rare for a new series to gain that kind of momentum so quickly, and it only happened because readers like you showed up, spread the word, left reviews, and kept turning pages.
Thank you for giving this series such a strong start. I am back at the desk working on Book Five, and knowing you are out there reading makes every long day worthwhile.