As far as we understand physics, actually traveling through interstellar medium is very very slow. Light itself takes next to forever to go from here to there.

As far as we understand physics, actually traveling through interstellar medium is very very slow. Light itself takes next to forever to go from here to there. Most likely, intelligent species realized it was much more fun to explore inner space rather than outer space. I'd wager we won't see them: they've surrounded their local stars with Dyson Spheres, communicating with highly directed, encrypted, massively wide-band, low power communications that would look rather like background radiation unless they were pointed right at us and we were meters away. Think about how important latency is to high frequency traders. In an information ecosystem, the laws of physics become paramount: latency and bandwidth are king. Physically being far from the action is essentially choosing to banish yourself to the hinterlands when everything exciting/valuable is happening at the hot core as close to the ball of fusion in the middle. update: Thinking further, if anyone has in fact developed FTL, you can bet your ass they don't want anyone else to have it. In space, Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest MotherF&@$%^# around. A baseball going 99% C is a weapon of mass destruction (http://what-if.xkcd.com/1/ http://what-if.xkcd.com/1/), much less a ship, which would essentially be a planet destroyer you literally couldn't see coming.