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Yvain comments on How inevitable was modern human civilization - data - Less Wrong
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4) There is a very easy and unavoidable way to destroy the universe (or make it inhospitable) using technology, and any technological civilization will inevitably do so at a certain pretty early point in its history. Therefore, only one technological civilization per universe ever exists, and we should not be surprised to find ourselves to be the first.
5) The Dark Lords of the Matrix are only interested in running one civilization in our particular sim.
We can still be surprised that we arrived in our universe so late.
6) Faster than light travel is not physically possible, the other civilizations all originated far away, and the other civilizations are all composed of people who don't like to live in generational spaceships their entire lives.
Your 6 falls under Simon's category 3: "they exist, but we can't detect them, and they aren't beaming an easy to detect advertisement of their existence to places where life might arise"
3.1) Further, they use some crypto-secure or sufficiently low-power RF communication that looks like or is masked by noise. They also don't leak much distinctive non-communicative RF (no Las Vegas).
3.1.1) They also have no interest (or ability) to create reasonably capable robots who don't mind the boredom of interstellar travel (either alone, or in an isolated community) as their emissaries
This is my hypothesis (3c), with an implicit overlay of (3a).
Generation spaceships? No joke...
Re 4), is this destruction supposed to violate relativity? Also, if so, why do we find ourselves so late in cosmic history? Similar anthropic considerations interfere with a non-FTL destruction mechanism like vacuumn collapse.