this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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Well you can find this material usually with "we are the first"-solutions to the Fermi Paradox.
If dust and gas is too hot it can't form new stars. So star formation has it's own cycles. Too much new big stars and star formation halts for some time till things cool down. There are plenty of collisions in Milkyways early history that caused a star birth eras when there was very little heavy elements present. There is also probability that milkyway had an active center in early days that kept things nice and sterile.
Okay, yeah, I'm familiar with the argument. I'm not alone in being unconvinced, though. There's a lot of exoplanets, including rocky ones around very old stars. Honestly, I felt assuming just a billion years of potential alien arrival was conservative.
Fairly unrelated to this discussion, but I'll link it because it's cool: there's a detectable echo of radiation from our galaxy being more active just a couple centuries ago, at least momentarily.
I don't know enough about the radiation one of those galaxies produce to comment on whether it could be sterilising. A thick enough atmosphere can block pretty much anything, though.