Friday, May 9, 2008
Lord Mayor of London
The new mayor of London, England, is a an attractive, intelligent, urbane conservative in the Thatcher-Reagan mold. Boris Johnson is also an American citizen, born in the U.S.A. That makes him eligible to become President of the United States in 2012-2016. We can't wait.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
He Speaks!
Herewith snippets from a refreshingly pithy "Open Letter to Environmentalists" by John Coleman, KUSI meteorologist, founder of TV's "Weather Channel" (May 4, 2008):
"(Your) war against fossil fuels has (degenerated) to a massive scare campaign. ... (Your) science is wrong: There is no significant man-made Global Warming under way, and ... your computer projections of weather chaos are (seriously) flawed.
"(Abandon) this Global Warming frenzy ... stop screaming, 'The sky is falling!'. It is not."
"Weather chaos"-- the modeling problem goes deeper far than that. By mathematical definition, no complex, chaotic system can ever be "modeled" to yield valid projections. In fact, the more complex the model, the less realistic its forecasts become. Climatologists continually "tweaking" inputs and processes guarantee that their creations will diverge from Nature at accelerating rates.
Rational, secular worldviews apparently cannot accept certain fundamental limitations. As Coleman hints, that does not alter Nature's way one whit.
"(Your) war against fossil fuels has (degenerated) to a massive scare campaign. ... (Your) science is wrong: There is no significant man-made Global Warming under way, and ... your computer projections of weather chaos are (seriously) flawed.
"(Abandon) this Global Warming frenzy ... stop screaming, 'The sky is falling!'. It is not."
"Weather chaos"-- the modeling problem goes deeper far than that. By mathematical definition, no complex, chaotic system can ever be "modeled" to yield valid projections. In fact, the more complex the model, the less realistic its forecasts become. Climatologists continually "tweaking" inputs and processes guarantee that their creations will diverge from Nature at accelerating rates.
Rational, secular worldviews apparently cannot accept certain fundamental limitations. As Coleman hints, that does not alter Nature's way one whit.
January 2009
Election results from the May 6 Democrat primaries in Indiana and North Carolina give Indiana to Clinton by a small margin, and North Carolina to Obama by a crushing 14-points. MzBill's Indiana "triumph" is certainly attributable to Rush Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos," without which she would probably also have sunk considerably lower in NC. We look forward to the demographic breakdown of Obama's victory, since NC has a large black population. In the general election this fall, decent white voters will overwhelm blind black racists.
Indiana and North Carolina reinforce our perception that most people can't stand the Clintons, and that Obama's appeal beyond ultra-left, hate-America, race-conscious Democrats is limited. Now, however, we think it unlikely that Clinton will generate strong enough popular support to cause the Democrats' August convention in Denver to Scrap the Sheik and Switch to the B-tch. Unless something truly horrific engulfs Obama (such as outright treason with Muslim Iran, of which we consider him not only capable but predisposed), this odious incompetent will campaign against Republican John McCain.
John McCain, Bob Dole redux with the difference that many Republicans can't stand him, will win the Presidency. His margin will be small but sufficient. Obama will continue to divide the country, but his black nationalist, socialist agenda will have been exposed and discredited. So McCain will mouth the oath of office this January (we don't believe a word he says).
We see two positives. At least McCain has the respect of the armed forces and will defend America by force if necessary. His Supreme Court appointees will show some evidence of having read the Constitution and respecting the rule of law. McCain's not smart enough cut tax rates, and he's a global warming dupe who can't wait to turn the U.S. over to illegal immigrants. But he's better than Obama. Imagine Louis Farrakhan as Secretary of State.
Indiana and North Carolina reinforce our perception that most people can't stand the Clintons, and that Obama's appeal beyond ultra-left, hate-America, race-conscious Democrats is limited. Now, however, we think it unlikely that Clinton will generate strong enough popular support to cause the Democrats' August convention in Denver to Scrap the Sheik and Switch to the B-tch. Unless something truly horrific engulfs Obama (such as outright treason with Muslim Iran, of which we consider him not only capable but predisposed), this odious incompetent will campaign against Republican John McCain.
John McCain, Bob Dole redux with the difference that many Republicans can't stand him, will win the Presidency. His margin will be small but sufficient. Obama will continue to divide the country, but his black nationalist, socialist agenda will have been exposed and discredited. So McCain will mouth the oath of office this January (we don't believe a word he says).
We see two positives. At least McCain has the respect of the armed forces and will defend America by force if necessary. His Supreme Court appointees will show some evidence of having read the Constitution and respecting the rule of law. McCain's not smart enough cut tax rates, and he's a global warming dupe who can't wait to turn the U.S. over to illegal immigrants. But he's better than Obama. Imagine Louis Farrakhan as Secretary of State.
The Great Divide
Political consensus holds that Hillary's 4-point squeaker in Indiana yesterday (Tuesday, May 6) was "entirely due" to Republican cross-over votes (credit Limbaugh's "OpChaos"). Drudge Report has MzBill "lending" her campaign some $6-million (of clandestine Saudi contributions) to stagger on, though Obama's extreme-left media partisans unanimously ordain this vile anti-Semite, Black Supremacist, rancid entitlement snob [standard lexicon] of necessity the D-rats' nominee.
Does MzBill expect that the Banana will surface additional Ayers, Rezkos, Wrights --terrorists, crooks, fringe-kook pulpiteers-- so that D-rat superdelegates will topple towards her in exhaustion when Big O's negatives become impossible? Must Obama's "skinist" constituency, no matter how betrayed, nonetheless turn out in force come November to extend their hate-America franchise?
Writing in "American Thinker", one Taru Taylor puts Obama in context of Tuskegee's Booker T. Washington (1880) vs. the demagogic agitator W.E.B. DuBois (1903). Washington's proudly self-reliant, bootstrap Americanism stands in brutal contrast to DuBois' "slave mentality" of perpetual resentment, promoting poverty and ignorance as cheap-junk excuses for socio-cultural malaise. As Taylor puts it, DuBois' black "Talented Tenth" rule over their benighted brethren as "elitist parasites who inhabit a Limbo between White bourgeois heaven and Black proletarian hell." [Taylor is talented, and black.]
Tough stuff, apropos to Jackson, Sharpton, Wright. BTW is not contrary to DuBois, but in stark contradiction-- they share no common ground. A century and a quarter past Tuskegee, we know where the Banana stands. Whose side are you on?
Does MzBill expect that the Banana will surface additional Ayers, Rezkos, Wrights --terrorists, crooks, fringe-kook pulpiteers-- so that D-rat superdelegates will topple towards her in exhaustion when Big O's negatives become impossible? Must Obama's "skinist" constituency, no matter how betrayed, nonetheless turn out in force come November to extend their hate-America franchise?
Writing in "American Thinker", one Taru Taylor puts Obama in context of Tuskegee's Booker T. Washington (1880) vs. the demagogic agitator W.E.B. DuBois (1903). Washington's proudly self-reliant, bootstrap Americanism stands in brutal contrast to DuBois' "slave mentality" of perpetual resentment, promoting poverty and ignorance as cheap-junk excuses for socio-cultural malaise. As Taylor puts it, DuBois' black "Talented Tenth" rule over their benighted brethren as "elitist parasites who inhabit a Limbo between White bourgeois heaven and Black proletarian hell." [Taylor is talented, and black.]
Tough stuff, apropos to Jackson, Sharpton, Wright. BTW is not contrary to DuBois, but in stark contradiction-- they share no common ground. A century and a quarter past Tuskegee, we know where the Banana stands. Whose side are you on?
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Children's Day
In Japan, May 5th is designated "Children's Day". Alas, since 1981 (27 years) the popping of rice-wine corks has been distinctly muted.
"All Aboard!" the Tokyo Express to demographic oblivion. Every year since Reagan's inauguration, the number of Japanese aged 14-years or younger has progressively declined. As of April 2008, grade-schoolers numbered 17,250,000, down 130,000 (-.75%) from a year earlier. This is a record low, the fewest kiddies since statistics first tabulated pre-adolescents back in 1950.
Worse yet, Japan's Internal Affairs Ministry reports that the ratio of flaming youth to total population has now shrunk to 13.5% over 34 years from 1974-- another record low, which shows no signs of any rebound. At 1.3% (13 per 1,000), Japan's fertility rate falls well below the standard 2.1% (21 per 1,000) required to sustain a population. By 2050, the Ministry estimates that Japan's native workforce could shrink by a third, to some 42.3-million if demographic trends continue.
Japan is not alone in facing catastrophic population shifts. Continental Europe, Russia, Scandinavia, also exhibit extreme negative birth-rates. Africa, Asia, Latin America, are by no means immune... drawing on polygamous sinkholes, even Lands of Araby show frissons of concern.
What is it about the Modern Era of free-market peace-and-prosperity in developed countries since the 1950s that fosters (sic) abandonment of home and family, long thought humanity's most basic urge? Mayhap a new Darwinian selection-process gathers steam, whereby functional parents willing to forego material gratifications for the benefit of their posterity will "go forth and multiply", inherit the Earth by virtual default.
What Igor Shatarevich has called "The Socialist Phenomenon" (Harper, 1975), foreword by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, puts "something for nothing" generations in perspective. Living well betimes, at nightfall they leave not even Names. "That which ye sow, that shall ye also reap"... who cannot bring himself to sacrifice for others, our precious Little Ones, deserves oblivion. Protest they may, but those evading the most fundamental biological necessity partake a Culture of Death of which they themselves are the first victims.
"All Aboard!" the Tokyo Express to demographic oblivion. Every year since Reagan's inauguration, the number of Japanese aged 14-years or younger has progressively declined. As of April 2008, grade-schoolers numbered 17,250,000, down 130,000 (-.75%) from a year earlier. This is a record low, the fewest kiddies since statistics first tabulated pre-adolescents back in 1950.
Worse yet, Japan's Internal Affairs Ministry reports that the ratio of flaming youth to total population has now shrunk to 13.5% over 34 years from 1974-- another record low, which shows no signs of any rebound. At 1.3% (13 per 1,000), Japan's fertility rate falls well below the standard 2.1% (21 per 1,000) required to sustain a population. By 2050, the Ministry estimates that Japan's native workforce could shrink by a third, to some 42.3-million if demographic trends continue.
Japan is not alone in facing catastrophic population shifts. Continental Europe, Russia, Scandinavia, also exhibit extreme negative birth-rates. Africa, Asia, Latin America, are by no means immune... drawing on polygamous sinkholes, even Lands of Araby show frissons of concern.
What is it about the Modern Era of free-market peace-and-prosperity in developed countries since the 1950s that fosters (sic) abandonment of home and family, long thought humanity's most basic urge? Mayhap a new Darwinian selection-process gathers steam, whereby functional parents willing to forego material gratifications for the benefit of their posterity will "go forth and multiply", inherit the Earth by virtual default.
What Igor Shatarevich has called "The Socialist Phenomenon" (Harper, 1975), foreword by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, puts "something for nothing" generations in perspective. Living well betimes, at nightfall they leave not even Names. "That which ye sow, that shall ye also reap"... who cannot bring himself to sacrifice for others, our precious Little Ones, deserves oblivion. Protest they may, but those evading the most fundamental biological necessity partake a Culture of Death of which they themselves are the first victims.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Curse of the Climatologists
Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) advocates have taken waterline hits lately-- what's a good Grant Recipient to do? Consider:
-- On April 21st, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (a slave to realism, due to satellite launch protocols) "confirmed that an impending (natural) phase-shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO, PDS)" will likely result in significantly cooler global temperatures from 2010 to 2029 (two decades).
-- On May 1st, Germany's Leibnitz Institute of Marine Sciences (LIMS) reported that Gulf Stream circulation in the North Atlantic ("Meridional Overturning Circulation", MOC) has entered an unambiguous down-phase, a cyclical decline "associated with cooler North Atlantic temperatures for up to eighty years" (through 2080 - 2090). This pattern, says the LIMS, explicitly resembles an earlier 40-year MOC prevailing from 1940 - 1979.
To arms! AGW's true believers rally their pseudo-scenarios in two ways. First, as Britain's Hadley Center (for climate studies) states, "(we expect) that man-made [anthropogenic] global warming will superimpose itself on natural (climatic) variations"-- i.e. that .009% CO2 emissions (one part per 100,000) will swamp atmospheric/oceanic factors determining planetary temperatures over 8 - 10+ decades. Ya think?
Second, AGW types increasingly rely on fudging temperature statistics dating from the 1950s and before: By claiming that original records somehow understated temperature readings during the last cooling phase (1940 - '79), Warmists lower their statistical base so that today's numbers appear relatively higher (warmer) in cyclical context. Comments Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit, who fingered this ploy in debunking Mann's notorious "hockey stick" graph in 2002, "Not only is there no natural or statistical evidence requiring such (downward) adjustment, but resort to shameless historical re-writes has characterized non-objective, politicized climate advocacy for many years."
Indeed, Warmists' phony Consensus continues to unravel. Critics increasingly dispute AGW propaganda in detail, expose the ludicrous presuppositions underlying their aggregate scenarios. To wit:
As of May 2, 2008, the U.K Telegraph relates that "IPCC models [the UN's risible Kyoto warmsters] admittedly do not factor in any actual events (!), such as strength of the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic or cyclical El Nino warming in the Pacific" (!!). That said, it follows that AGW scenarios do not (cannot?) address standard solar-radiation factors (sunspots, Maunder Minimums, etc.), geophysical or plate-tectonic climate elements-- outside their taxaholic bureaucratic enclaves, anything at all. What's that you say?-- your grant's away!
Reviewing a Nature Journal article by Hadley Center Warm-worts, the eminent Dr. Roger Pelke baldly noted: "If global cooling over the next few decades is consistent with (current warming) predictions, then so too is everything." Yet in the NYT, one Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, asserts that "Too many think that Global Warming means monotonic, relentlessly escalating temperatures worldwide." But if "warming" is not global, shows no consistent upside patterns... then as Pelke says, neither will anything, including a major cooling shift. (Pelke means, an end of the Interglacial Holocene going back 10,000 years.) Whatever his purported credentials, NCAR's Trenberth might benefit from a remedial course in freshman logic.
We write at length, not expecting any audience but because cyberspace has the great virtue of preserving everything. Years from now, when AGW extremism has gone the way of Ehrlich's "Population Bomb" (1969), these Blacksmith comments will cheerfully remain. We post at one remove, of course... unlike Steve McIntyre et al. we claim neither expertise nor much originality. But independent private citizens assessing facts in place of "mere opinion", citing Nature's reality in opposition to cultists' drivel, is surely no bad thing.
Arbitrary, agenda-driven "climate models" promote circular-reasoned academic computer programs. Absent all "actual facts," designed to validate flawed suppositions in advance, these elaborate fantasy-exercises are entitled to no respect whatever. Such foolish fads cannot persist indefinitely
-- On April 21st, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (a slave to realism, due to satellite launch protocols) "confirmed that an impending (natural) phase-shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO, PDS)" will likely result in significantly cooler global temperatures from 2010 to 2029 (two decades).
-- On May 1st, Germany's Leibnitz Institute of Marine Sciences (LIMS) reported that Gulf Stream circulation in the North Atlantic ("Meridional Overturning Circulation", MOC) has entered an unambiguous down-phase, a cyclical decline "associated with cooler North Atlantic temperatures for up to eighty years" (through 2080 - 2090). This pattern, says the LIMS, explicitly resembles an earlier 40-year MOC prevailing from 1940 - 1979.
To arms! AGW's true believers rally their pseudo-scenarios in two ways. First, as Britain's Hadley Center (for climate studies) states, "(we expect) that man-made [anthropogenic] global warming will superimpose itself on natural (climatic) variations"-- i.e. that .009% CO2 emissions (one part per 100,000) will swamp atmospheric/oceanic factors determining planetary temperatures over 8 - 10+ decades. Ya think?
Second, AGW types increasingly rely on fudging temperature statistics dating from the 1950s and before: By claiming that original records somehow understated temperature readings during the last cooling phase (1940 - '79), Warmists lower their statistical base so that today's numbers appear relatively higher (warmer) in cyclical context. Comments Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit, who fingered this ploy in debunking Mann's notorious "hockey stick" graph in 2002, "Not only is there no natural or statistical evidence requiring such (downward) adjustment, but resort to shameless historical re-writes has characterized non-objective, politicized climate advocacy for many years."
Indeed, Warmists' phony Consensus continues to unravel. Critics increasingly dispute AGW propaganda in detail, expose the ludicrous presuppositions underlying their aggregate scenarios. To wit:
As of May 2, 2008, the U.K Telegraph relates that "IPCC models [the UN's risible Kyoto warmsters] admittedly do not factor in any actual events (!), such as strength of the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic or cyclical El Nino warming in the Pacific" (!!). That said, it follows that AGW scenarios do not (cannot?) address standard solar-radiation factors (sunspots, Maunder Minimums, etc.), geophysical or plate-tectonic climate elements-- outside their taxaholic bureaucratic enclaves, anything at all. What's that you say?-- your grant's away!
Reviewing a Nature Journal article by Hadley Center Warm-worts, the eminent Dr. Roger Pelke baldly noted: "If global cooling over the next few decades is consistent with (current warming) predictions, then so too is everything." Yet in the NYT, one Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, asserts that "Too many think that Global Warming means monotonic, relentlessly escalating temperatures worldwide." But if "warming" is not global, shows no consistent upside patterns... then as Pelke says, neither will anything, including a major cooling shift. (Pelke means, an end of the Interglacial Holocene going back 10,000 years.) Whatever his purported credentials, NCAR's Trenberth might benefit from a remedial course in freshman logic.
We write at length, not expecting any audience but because cyberspace has the great virtue of preserving everything. Years from now, when AGW extremism has gone the way of Ehrlich's "Population Bomb" (1969), these Blacksmith comments will cheerfully remain. We post at one remove, of course... unlike Steve McIntyre et al. we claim neither expertise nor much originality. But independent private citizens assessing facts in place of "mere opinion", citing Nature's reality in opposition to cultists' drivel, is surely no bad thing.
Arbitrary, agenda-driven "climate models" promote circular-reasoned academic computer programs. Absent all "actual facts," designed to validate flawed suppositions in advance, these elaborate fantasy-exercises are entitled to no respect whatever. Such foolish fads cannot persist indefinitely
Friday, May 2, 2008
Pacific Decadal Shift
As of May Day, NASA has announced that due to a "Pacific Decadal Shift " (PDS), the years 2010 - 2029 will likely represent a global cooling phase. Of course, this looming PDS is but one climatological factor out of many, nor does NASA provide context or perspective on any related non-PDS episodes. But this scenario accords well with alternating warming/cooling phases of increasing frequency from 1890, the end of a 500-year Little Ice Age from the late-middle 14th Century (about AD 1350).
Over fifty years, 1890 - 1939, Earth experienced an extreme warming rebound. From 1940 - 1979, forty years, patterns turned noticeably cold (remember Newsweek's notorious glacial alarmism?). Then over thirty years, 1980 - 2009 has devolved a relatively milder stage, though satellite data indicates not warming but a stable climate regime from 1996/98. So NASA's 20-year extrapolation (2010 - 2029) precisely fits a 120-year old pattern.
Alas, cycles of ever-higher frequencies, greater amplitudes must end when global thermostats crash by simultaneously switching on and off. After an inchoate period of conflicting, rapid shifts through (say) 2069 (thirty years from 2029), quite possibly our Holocene Interglacial will become one with Nineveh and Tyre as Ice Time proceeds on cyclical schedule for 110,000 years. We're overdue by 1,500 years already.
Global climate is "chaotic" in Lorenz's fractal-geometric sense (non-random, but strictly indeterminate). Nature, objective reality, cares nothing for skewed computer models, which by mathematical necessity are useless anyhow. But cycles are cycles, whatever elements or factors they entail. We've warned the kids, as this 21st Century wears on, to seek out lower latitudes. By 2029 if not before, the weight of "cooling" evidence will be undeniable.
Over fifty years, 1890 - 1939, Earth experienced an extreme warming rebound. From 1940 - 1979, forty years, patterns turned noticeably cold (remember Newsweek's notorious glacial alarmism?). Then over thirty years, 1980 - 2009 has devolved a relatively milder stage, though satellite data indicates not warming but a stable climate regime from 1996/98. So NASA's 20-year extrapolation (2010 - 2029) precisely fits a 120-year old pattern.
Alas, cycles of ever-higher frequencies, greater amplitudes must end when global thermostats crash by simultaneously switching on and off. After an inchoate period of conflicting, rapid shifts through (say) 2069 (thirty years from 2029), quite possibly our Holocene Interglacial will become one with Nineveh and Tyre as Ice Time proceeds on cyclical schedule for 110,000 years. We're overdue by 1,500 years already.
Global climate is "chaotic" in Lorenz's fractal-geometric sense (non-random, but strictly indeterminate). Nature, objective reality, cares nothing for skewed computer models, which by mathematical necessity are useless anyhow. But cycles are cycles, whatever elements or factors they entail. We've warned the kids, as this 21st Century wears on, to seek out lower latitudes. By 2029 if not before, the weight of "cooling" evidence will be undeniable.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Take Us to Your Leader
Per an article by Nick Bostrum in MIT's "Technology Review" (April-May 2008):
In the late 1940s, when the UFO craze was just starting, Enrico Fermi of the Manhattan Project was asked whether he credited UFOs as driven by extraterrestrial intelligence. Fermi was not interested in UFOs as such. Instead he asked, if Visitors are with us, "then where are they?"
The real question is, Where have they been? Martian microbes, huge creatures plumbing 50-mile deep oceans on Enceladus are one thing-- high-tech extraterrestrial civilizations are another. By Clarke's Law, sufficiently advanced technologies are "indistinguishable from magic". What matters is a scientific/technological culture, not whether it evolved from (say) giant squid or insectivorous arthropods.
Our Milky Way Galaxy is some 100-thousand light years in diameter, comprising 100-billion stars. But Virgo, the great galaxy centering our Local Group, contains 3-trillion stars, thirty times the Milky Way's, with billions of large globular clusters disposed around a disk ten times our size (one billion LY diameter). Virgo is 65-million LYs away, so what we see coincides with the Cretaceous/Tertiary (KT) boundary, when the Chicxulub meteor-strike in Yucatan extinguished the dinosaurs forever. On a scale of 1-inch = 100,000 LYs, Virgo is some 54 feet (650 inches) beyond the Milky Way... the (visible) Universe itself extends some 2.25 miles, to 45th Street from the base of Washington Square Arch in Greenwich Village.
Anyhow, to answer Fermi, we assume that "stars like dust" are veritable swamps of (by definition) extraterrestrial life. But by the statistical "principle of mediocrity", whereby any given sample or even set of samples tends to cluster around a mean, high-tech alien civilizations will likely rise and fall in isolation: Separated by 25,000 LYs in space, easily 100-million years of time.
Even should instantaneous teleportation or some quantum-physical effect render such a culture capable of journeying anywhere, at any time, chances are that, first, exploration would be defeated by sheer number [Carl Sagan]; or second, that no contact could occur because within that space/time reference-frame there would be nothing to contact.
Suppose the Black Ships did land in Central Park tomorrow. Our first question should not be "Who are you?" or "Where are you from?" but "Why are you here?"
When Captain James Cook landed in Hawaii in 1776, native cultures perished; by 1890, 80% of the aboriginal habitants were gone. In 1944, Admiral Chester Nimitz's fast-carrier fleet touched stone-age Fiji: Within a generation, the islands had joined the UN, prospered under Australian territorial administration-- from cannibalism to Big Macs by 1970s.
Who then are our Starfarers? Frankly, we'd rather wait another 500 years or so before we have to ask the question.
In the late 1940s, when the UFO craze was just starting, Enrico Fermi of the Manhattan Project was asked whether he credited UFOs as driven by extraterrestrial intelligence. Fermi was not interested in UFOs as such. Instead he asked, if Visitors are with us, "then where are they?"
The real question is, Where have they been? Martian microbes, huge creatures plumbing 50-mile deep oceans on Enceladus are one thing-- high-tech extraterrestrial civilizations are another. By Clarke's Law, sufficiently advanced technologies are "indistinguishable from magic". What matters is a scientific/technological culture, not whether it evolved from (say) giant squid or insectivorous arthropods.
Our Milky Way Galaxy is some 100-thousand light years in diameter, comprising 100-billion stars. But Virgo, the great galaxy centering our Local Group, contains 3-trillion stars, thirty times the Milky Way's, with billions of large globular clusters disposed around a disk ten times our size (one billion LY diameter). Virgo is 65-million LYs away, so what we see coincides with the Cretaceous/Tertiary (KT) boundary, when the Chicxulub meteor-strike in Yucatan extinguished the dinosaurs forever. On a scale of 1-inch = 100,000 LYs, Virgo is some 54 feet (650 inches) beyond the Milky Way... the (visible) Universe itself extends some 2.25 miles, to 45th Street from the base of Washington Square Arch in Greenwich Village.
Anyhow, to answer Fermi, we assume that "stars like dust" are veritable swamps of (by definition) extraterrestrial life. But by the statistical "principle of mediocrity", whereby any given sample or even set of samples tends to cluster around a mean, high-tech alien civilizations will likely rise and fall in isolation: Separated by 25,000 LYs in space, easily 100-million years of time.
Even should instantaneous teleportation or some quantum-physical effect render such a culture capable of journeying anywhere, at any time, chances are that, first, exploration would be defeated by sheer number [Carl Sagan]; or second, that no contact could occur because within that space/time reference-frame there would be nothing to contact.
Suppose the Black Ships did land in Central Park tomorrow. Our first question should not be "Who are you?" or "Where are you from?" but "Why are you here?"
When Captain James Cook landed in Hawaii in 1776, native cultures perished; by 1890, 80% of the aboriginal habitants were gone. In 1944, Admiral Chester Nimitz's fast-carrier fleet touched stone-age Fiji: Within a generation, the islands had joined the UN, prospered under Australian territorial administration-- from cannibalism to Big Macs by 1970s.
Who then are our Starfarers? Frankly, we'd rather wait another 500 years or so before we have to ask the question.
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