It's a slow day at Milliways, and the kobold is getting bored. Usually she'd solve this with a math lesson, or a conversation with Bar, or just heading home to catch up with her tribe, but one of her friends asked her to do some scouting, recently, so that's today's task. She goes up to her room for it, makes a portal to a random ship, and watches.
"I suppose someone might notice if they were trying to catch a lot of alien animals to study and one species never got caught."
"I suppose that's not necessarily lonelier than being the only species of people on a planet, which most are until they develop space travel."
"The Federation as a matter of policy doesn't contact anyone who is pre-warp. Other civilizations don't have this policy but in practice usually don't anyway."
"There are a lot of people who find it nice to know that there are other kinds of people out there."
"You were using the word for the problem people have when they're away from other people too long, right?"
"Yes, but in the language I'm speaking it also gets applied to situations like being in a crowded place and feeling ignored, or not having an adequate sense of other people being separate beings with distinct experiences."
"Yeah, that's the word. Just having more people around doesn't fix it if they aren't doing the right things. For kobolds and I think humans, anyway, I don't know about your species."
"I suppose some species would not be satisfying neighbors in this sense. The Federation is made up of many species who get along well. I'm half human and half Vulcan."
Nod. "Kobolds wouldn't be very interested, anyway; I'm weird like that. Is there anything you'd be interested in trading for that I can watch for?"
"I'm comfortable enough myself - although if you have anything that does immortality I'd be interested in that - I'm mostly trying to figure out how to get opportunities for people who aren't as comfortable."
"Milliways has people come through who can do de-aging, not often but often enough. I'm not sure what the other thing would look like."
"Hm - well, an example of what I'm thinking of would be if another civilization - ideally one with an Earth, so translation can be handled through Earth languages without everyone needing to have a pendant - maybe not at our tech level exactly but close enough to understand the general shape of our tech scene and vice versa, were to get in touch with us, perhaps with a pure data connection - can you run wires through your portals? - to share information and ideas."
"I can do wires through portals, yeah, and that sounds easy and safe enough that I wouldn't mind setting it up."
"Delightful! I don't suppose you have such a civilization handy? I'm also excited about the prospect of time in Milliways to look for them or something similar myself."
"Hm. I don't think Green's government would make an exception for interdimensional humans, and that's the closest I have handy. - Green is an AI; there was a war between the AI and their world's humans, and the AIs won it. Their humans are okay but they're not allowed to have enough tech to develop AIs or leave Earth."
"That's not a very generous definition of okay. Would they want to emigrate if that were possible?"