[AgentZero]

Oi, folks, back on topic! We're supposed to be helping out Starhawk here. Just a few thoughts on 'tech balance' from my 3rd Dynasty Universe (the one Hell is for Heroes is set in. Look forward to a few new chapters this week, btw). In that universe, humanity is signifcantly more advanced than any other race in the galaxy, aside from one which is ridiculously more advanced but has little interest in the affairs of 'inferior' races. However, humanity isn't terribly aggressive in this universe, since they got lucky in the grand scheme of things and have a large number of habitable worlds. I've got a spreadsheet somewhere with all the details, but just winging it, the Terran Imperium (as it is known) consists of 2,252 habitable worlds, of which only 1,823 are colonized. In contrast, the Tauran Empire, which is roughly the same size cubic-lightyear-wise has 1,452 worlds to it's name and has colonized them all. This creates tension between the two empires, since the Taurans want to expand, but humanity isn't about to start giving away bits of it's empire, even if it hasn't really got a use for them.
Terran ships tend to be fast, heavily armoured and pack so much firepower it would liquify your brain to even think about it. The Taurans on the other hand tend to just cobble together ships with an eye towards building them quickly, rather than having them last very long once it hits the fan.
Other races have mainly been confined to a few star systems, and eargerly greet any conflict between Terrans and Taurans (yes, the name similarity is on purpose) as an oportunity to slice off a little piece of the big pie.

As for the whole whether or not an FTL race would have found us by now, I think most arguments are flawed by assuming that an alien race would have even remotely the same motivations as our own. Furthermore, while I find the notion that we are the only sentient life in the universe absurd on simple grounds of probablilty, even if there is more than one sentient race per galaxy in 99.99999999999% of the universe, ours could still be one of the many where only one sentient race has evolved.

And someone just answer one question for me because I honestly don't know the answer: Our solar system is located in one of the arms of the Milky Way's spiral, now does that make it part of the older (first to form) or newer parts of the galaxy?