This isn't what's happening, but: sometimes I find it very romantic to consider a narrative where some sort of super sci fi interstellar civilization has a thing they do but only occasionally, like they only launch one FTL ship per century or occasionally pyrotechnic space battles break out, and when this happens it has a signature visible many light years away, and astronomers in this one spiral backwater are scratching their heads going I wonder what physics causes this https://mastodon.social/@coreyspowell/111189195645049432
@mcc at least one Banks Culture novel has this as a plot point, Look To Windward
@falken in retrospect it seems obvious this would turn out to be the case