Besides, I'd rather we risk ending up on the galactic buffet table for the chance of finding life forms we can "compare notes with". We're all going to die and go extinct regardless.
And it only takes one massively paranoid, xenophobic species lobbing big rocks at people to ruin the entire neighbourhood.
I don't think camouflaging necessarily means not leaving your gravity well, but if there's someone lobbing big rocks at potential threats, then the only ones exploring will be the ones powerful enough or good enough at hiding for us to be unlikely to spot them unless they want us to. Everyone else will be dead.
It's one of the more compelling answers to the Fermi paradox to me, while at the same time being profoundly depressing. But it's less depressing than the chance that there might not be any other civilizations.
"And it only takes one massively paranoid, xenophobic species lobbing big rocks at people to ruin the entire neighbourhood."
Ahh, Germany ...
I misplaced a link and the name of an author of a sci-fi novel in which space battles are much more science based than the usual laser-tag shoot off. I'll dig through my bookmarks and hopefully post the name in the reply when I get to my pc..
I think there was also a reddit thread about it sometimes in the past.
That's a rather significant difference to the proposed idea.
Do keep in mind that diversity enables diversity. If biosphere complexity falls enough changes are it will never recover. Earth had live almost immediately after formation. It took more than 2.5B years for something more complex to emerge from the ur uni-cellular broth. Evolution or linear increasing complexity is not guaranteed by any means. What will a chimp bashing rocks in the bush be doing in 1000 000 years? Building quantum computers or bashing rocks. Overwhelming evidence points to bashing rocks.