Captain Amazing:
I’m not sure if you meant this as a joke. It doesn’t correspond to the Fermi paradox, unless your family is thought to number in the quadrillions. If so, it would be reasonable to expect that at least one of them had travelled to China.
Gary Kumquat:
By the definition used in this thread and most discussions of this issue, we have only achieved intelligence within the last 100 years. The timespan for colonizing the galaxy is on the order of 5 million years. So I suggest a little patience is in order.
SPOOFE
You sound like my niece. Why, unca Jeff, why? Why? WHY?
The regular movements of a galactic civilization would be hard to disguise. I have an excellent book by Dr. Robert Zubrin titled Entering Space about the necessary steps to explore the stars. Good book, and I highly respect his work. In a chapter called Meeting ET he details the reasons we should be able to detect any significant starship activity by ET civilizations; in fact, he thinks this approach has more chance for success at detecting ET than projects such as SETI and Phoenix. Unfortunately, thus far nothing has been spotted by anyone.
Certainly it is possible that all the other ETs are on the same evolutionary timeline as us, but I think most scientists consider this improbable. As mentioned in this Scientific American article and this lecture from Wake Forest University, chances are extremely slim that ET is technologically within 100 or even 1000 years of us. Many of the proposed ETs would likely have a million years head start, or more.
g00g00fish
Again, the Stay at Home hypothesis may do for 1 or 2 ET civilizations, but all of them? It seems highly unlikely to assume everyone will want to stay home, and it just takes one civilization to be interested in colonizing the galaxy for it to happen in a relatively quick manner.
By the way, welcome to the SDMB!