Arkady Babchenko: "Nuclear Threshold"

“There is such a term as the “nuclear threshold”. This is that moment in the development of civilization when it already had the brains to build nuclear weapons, but did not have the brains not to use them. There is an opinion that we cannot find brothers in mind precisely because that civilizations never cross the nuclear threshold.

That is, all civilizations that have reached approximately our level of development ultimately destroy themselves in a mutual atomic war. This is why space is empty.

That is, the average lifespan of a technically advanced civilization is millennia, if not centuries. In extreme variations of this assumption, it is possible that this is why we all descended fifty thousand years ago from a small group of Homo sapiens who survived in Africa."