Do you know how many people there are in the System? A billion billion, marvelled Gompertz. And nine settled planets! And hundreds of thousands of years in time, millions of years in fact. And in all that immensity of time and space we have never yet had any contact with any other intelligent life. Nothing on Mars and Venus, nothing on the outer planets. Not even lichen! It shattered the science-fiction market when we got to Mars. Canals! Monsterous tape worms! Sentient plants! Can you imagine what that did the the fringe scientists? All the theorists were out of business once the planets were ours.
1963.