That's an interesting hypothesis, and personally I hope it's right. I've always worried that the Fermi Paradox results from the enormous costs of traveling interstellar distances. Societies that could attempt it simply don't because it is prohibitive to do so. I'd much rather our species travel to another planet only to find it covered in algae than to have our species bottled up here for eternity.
Reminds me very much of "The Mote in God's Eye". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God's_Eye [wikipedia.org] The humans discover faster-than-light travel and encounter an intelligent species that never discovered the secret. They have degenerated into a civilization / crash / rebuild cycle.
I hope the same doesn't happen to us, as I don't think faster-than-light travel is possible.
I'll never forget, as a child, having my respect for Carl Sagan completely destroyed when I heard him say that, since the distances involved in interstellar travel were so huge it was impossible that any alien species would ever make such journeys. Even at as a child I could conceive of aliens for whom a journey of 1000 years would be acceptable. Why couldn't Carl Sagan conceive of it?
Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/8bexQWsPULU/story01.htm
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