Well, another option is that it takes - say - 200 years to get from the stage of "we're producing enough radio output to be visible" to "we developed cloaking" or "we switch to other tech that is intentionally or not - not visible".

If that's true, only a very small fraction of planets with intelligent life would land in the window where we can observe them.

Another option is that you might have many civilisations that are just as intelligent, and just as developed, but not in the same fashion - imagine 99% of intelligent species out there are more like dolphins than like humans.

Or their atmosphere is just a bit more hazy than ours, so they are not aware of the night sky filled with sky, so with less curiosity to imagine the world outside of theirs.

Well, if you want to get technical, the major problem with this theory is that MACHOs are not a good candidate for dark matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_compact_halo_object#Th... Even if you imagine they were all hiding, their previous effects on the universe are missing.

Aha, you must need to erase yourself from your timeline, else the EAILD will find you from your past traces.

Another problem is that the effectiveness of the cloaking devices would have to be extraordinarily high across an extraordinarily large number of instances.

Why unlikely? Someone has to be last

> Someone has to be last

That makes it possible, not likely.

For any population N > 2, it's less likely that you'll be last than that you will not be last.

Actually someone has to be latest, and rather each civilization for some time t will have its turn at being the latest.

looking at the data, it’s like we’re trying our damndest to be last. Defunding education, limiting what can be taught (ex: Texas removing critical thinking), etc all seem like we just enjoy tripping on our own shoe laces

You're focusing on the wrong scale. Intelligence has skyrocketed in the past thousand years. Policy decisions in our lifetime, do not matter or they end all human matters at once.

Certain policy decisions matter on a larger scale. Killing off millions of people has to have some meaning on future abilities, right?

I think that generally I agree with you, but I would tend to say you have a small (but >0) number of things that would have huge long term ripples.

> Defunding education, limiting what can be taught

Many people became educated and even advanced science before the government got involved in education.

Indeed who's to say if the current worldview we share is a knowledge maximizing one.