I predict most young civilizations to be early (because the universe gets burned up quickly), and I predict most civilizations to not be young, given that life is common. When we observe ourselves to be young and late (are we actually late?), Fermi's paradox results.

Fermi's paradox also makes mention of the fact that there are billions of stars in the galaxy that are billions of years older than ours, many of them having habitable planets. Some reasons have prevented any of these from spawning a galactic colonization wave - and those reasons are of interest to us.