I once started writing a story with a "monster universe" setting but in space. Werewolves and vampires always at war with each other. Humans and animal-humanoids caught in the middle. A few eldritch horrors lurking around the void.
I did a self contained short story set in that universe, about an observation station sitting at the edge of the galaxy, monitoring for potential intergalactic information. They detect a large mass of dark matter that only became detectable when it got close enough to reflect light from our galaxy. As they observed, they realized that the string of dark matter was just a tentacle the size of a large star cluster, and they couldn't see what was on the other end. It swept close and then retracted away.
I played a fantasy game (on Nintendo 64!) that had a lore waaaay too ridiculously deep for itself, but part of it was that a vaguely dwarvish race had dwindled to a single city via repeated wars and pogroms from other races, and were living under the protection of one of the large human kingdoms at the time. These dwarves were also secretly harboring the last known dragon in the world, who had given magic to humans about a thousand years ago.
Plus isn't the rate of expansion of the universe increasing? So at some point, even going at light speed, your destination will recede faster than you can travel.
That's why faster than light travel is the holy grail. Without it, we're just kind of stuck.
Imagine if wormholes had zero constraints on the physical location of the other side of the wormhole though. We could open a portal to OUTSIDE the observable universe. What a mindfuck. We might even find a false vacuum decay racing towards us at the speed light, or regions of space that are contracting instead of expanding, or initiate a new big bang by opening a wormhole to an area of space where that hasn't happened...we could travel to a point where we can watch the milky way get formed, since the light of its formation is just reaching that region of space. If it turns out the heat death of the universe is just a local phenomenon, we could continue expanding forever beyond it. World without end.
We've already discovered fission and photocells. We're past the point of needing fossil fuels for a new civilization (or existing civilization). Fossil fuels are only hanging around for economic reasons.
Fair enough, guess it depends on how many resources they're willing to sink into first strike capability. Maybe a strongly expansionist civilization would have such a more efficient use of resources it would quickly catch up to a dark forest predator trying to wipe them out. Like a swarm of piranha eating a shark.
I don't disagree with the experiments themselves, I just think the results are too broadly applied to "work" rather than "the specific task replicated in the study". The meta study you linked actually brings up that point, but it's paywalled and the abstract doesn't give the results. I'd be interested to see their conclusions.
That's nuts. In two million years, humans will be sighing and saying wistfully "if I had a time machine, I'd want to go back to the time of the full eclipses, like 2024"