Therapod

This is a sketch of an original work fiction © Us:

1. Background
   1. The story is one of first contact and a central element is that the evolutionary line on Earth is a deviation from the "normal Saurian line" for the development of life on planets like it.
   2. The density and history of planets with life and intelligent life in the universe generally are elements. The former is given a value on the conservative end of the orders of magnitude between 1 per "galaxy like ours" and 4 10⁴ which was Drake's original figure, e.g. say 5 for the per galaxy count and 10⁶ for the galaxy count which is 50 million worlds where life has independently reached the stage of scientific civilization (SC).
   3. The next element is the fraction that have past the Omega point, the technological singularity, the final stage of en:Metasystem transition, control of culture. Because of the primary plot element, this would have occurred on Earth sometime on or about the time of the Cretaceous boundary event. Assuming a universal time frame and that that would be around the earliest then the implication would be the vast majority of worlds with intelligent life were independently post singularity.
   4. The number of worlds with life of any kind is assumed to be at least 2 or 4 orders of magnitude perhaps more than the per galaxy count in 2. For this reason, the universal culture does not have an economic incentive to monitor worlds for emergent intelligent life but instead reacts to the detection of same when the stage of scientific civilization is reached, i.e. when EM transmission from that planet reach a light cone with a radius of a few light years. With 1 order of magnitude error on that the contact is therefore now, i.e. about 100 years after RF transmissions began, with physics being done in the current time creating a signal that doesn't have to be searched for in the manner of SETI but is automatically detected everwhere like the cosmic background radiation.
   5. After reaching the Omega point worlds do not necessarily end their ethical development in a condition which we expect for advanced being. In particular some races reach that point and seek to expand their physical range in a manner similar to that in which civilization has developed on the Earth.
   6. So physics that we know is taken seriously but assumed to be primitive. It is assumed that there are means to communicate over cosmic distances more or less instantaneously but physical travel requires that the travelers essentially commit to being settlers of the target of any journey which would separate them by cosmological or even intersectorial distances. Thus any expansion done after reaching the level at which it could be accomplished must be done within a relatively small radius of one's homeworld. Communications however are not limited and thus a larger, higher level universal culture exists which perforce does have the ethical level we assume for the endpoint of development.
2. Politics of the Cosmic Culture
   1. Although Saurians are the dominant form that develops on Earth-like planets, and Earth like planets are the majority of those that do develop SC, there is a good deal of variety and the physical constraints mean that the general culture is one that operates as pure culture if you will. The local material cultures interact with each other perforce but not as equals because even after the technological singularity which allows them to be aware of the cosmic social order, development continues and there is an economics of cultural interchange between local cultures.
   2. Within a range of a few hundreds or thousands of light years, local cultures seek to extend their material basis.
3. Plot
   1. The Milky Way actually has only two planets with intelligent life the other being a saurian race that reached the singularity a few thousand years ago and detected EM transmissions from Earth within a few decades of them being sent and have dispatched first physical contact teams. The actual distance to their homeworld is about 30K ly.