Two or more advanced civilizations aren't even aware of each other
Humans have achieved FTL and have colonized several planets in our greater stellar neighborhood. While we have discovered several planets that harbor life as we know it, we have not yet discovered other intelligent life. However, this isn't because we haven't yet encountered it; within the same stellar neighborhoods we've come to inhabit, there exist one or more intelligent and technologically advanced civilizations, none of which have yet become aware of each other or us. It may even be the case that a single star system plays host to all of them simultaneously, and they still haven't found each other.
How do you keep FTL-capable, intelligent, advanced civilizations from noticing or even bothering each other?
EDIT: Constraints: The creatures themselves must be similar enough to humans that they could be easily recognized as intelligent if encountered in-person. Individuals should be roughly similar in size to humans (they could be as large as whales or as small as bugs, but not, for example, microscopic or telescopic in scale.)
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/75810. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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You need to make their anatomies, societies, means of communication, nature of technology, and other seemingly small details so radically different from each other, that even when they see each other, they fail to recognize it.
I can see a small parallel with the Real World (TM) humans, chimpanzees, ants, and dolphins. All four species live in cooperative social groups, often with hierarchies. All four use language in some form. All four have what could be argued as tool use. All four exhibit signs of intelligence (although ant intelligence is on a collective level.)
Humans arose last of all, but we have co-existed on this Earth for a million-ish years. Yet only recently has one of us begun to realize the potential of the other three. To this day, ants see humans only as large, dangerous things that might step on them or dig up their homes. Chimps see ants as food. Dolphins probably don't even know what an ant is. Humans debate whether a bubble net is actually a tool.
As another precedent, just a few hundred years ago, some humans looked at other humans and labeled them savage animals, just because their definitions of society differed.
Expand this to an interplanetary level, and one particularly anthropocentric (or whatever it is called for their species) creature could easily overlook another, dismissing it as just another puny insignificant life form.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/75811. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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