User blog comment:Elseweyr/Mass Effect bubble soon punctured?/@comment-8419211-20130725213545/@comment-4950455-20130726064935

Except that's actually a fairly realistic turn of events. Given how the conditions have been right for life to evolve in this galaxy, there's a pretty good chance that any aliens we ever meet are going to be immensely far ahead of us. A mixture of "clarketech" and "firmly-grounded science" seems far more likely than the standard space opera setting where everyone has more or less the same sort of technology.