>>476646If this is your way to make social commentary:
A+But if you want to solve the Fermi paradox, via a big filter hypothesis, that stops civilization from exploring the universe, you have to explain why this affects every single species. Because it just takes one species and roughly 10K years to conquer the hole galaxy with technology we could already build.
In my humble opinion the only reason why we're not getting alien signals is because advanced alien species found something better to send information than radio waves.
The ISS got outfitted with it's first communication laser in 2014. If all the Aliens laser-phone with each other, you're not going to notice it unless you're crossing one of their beams. They might have something even better than lasers. There are already scientists that are attempting to use Neutrino based communication. The military is funding this because that would make communication with submarines a lot easier.
Anyway I wouldn't be too harsh on sci-fi entertainment, to a significant extend this is people trying to popularize the idea that it's possible to go to space. If you invent the tech that will make it possible to kick off large scale space exploration, there will not be much cultural objection to it, because people watched enough scifi to normalize the idea. Go back in history when air-planes got invented, there was considerable resistance by people who thought that humans lacking wings simply weren't meant to fly and actively tried to stop it. That shit happens a lot less these days.
I guess you can perhaps complain that there is too much science fantasy where technology is just magic, and that doesn't really serve as points of entry for people going into space-tech. But this entertainment could also serve as a bridge to education. Make a sci-fi video game where it's possible to seamlessly move from the fiction part to the science part simply by digging deeper into the game. Get people interested with brain-candy and then gradually bait-and switch them over to a technical education without them noticing.
I also want to point out that if you're on a space-ship crossing the vast darkness of space, all that distraction technology might come in handy to keep you from loosing your shit, because it prevents you from staring into the abyss.