Tam had a dream... no, wait... it was a nightmare.

Stolen complete from View From The Porch. What a vision.

In my dream, Bobbi came home from work all bubbling with the inside scoop that there was going to be a big media announcement from the .gov that night, announcing first contact with intelligent aliens! There was an alien ship in orbit right now!

So the announcement was made, and the series of let-downs began.

Sure, there was a multi-species interstellar culture, but it really wasn't any more technologically advanced than our own (and less advanced in many ways), with the exception that they'd figured out how to pop a spaceship from Point A to Point B by putting enough electric power into their gizmotron. Other than that, the spaceships were not really any more advanced than a nuclear sub, right down to the fission power plants and archaic monochrome CRT monitors.

And the way they got organized enough to build the things was that most of the alien races had huge, planet-wide bureaucratic World Governments. Sure, you could travel to other star systems, but all you'd wind up finding was New Jersey with green skies, or Belgium with funny-looking trees, and the Space United Nations was everywhere. The whole universe was out there, and most of it was deadly dull and required going through the TSA to get to.

I woke up with the most awful sense of ennui that I have ever felt.

What a really horrible vision.