NOTE: That 6.500 is *after* more than a century of mass communications technology. While it is possible that several more centuries of mass communications could bring that average down much further, in the Traveller universe you only truly have mass communications within a single system. And you also have lengthy periods (such as for example the Long Night and the various wars mentioned in canon) during which interstellar, interplanetary and even inTRAplanetary communications have been curtailed. Not to mention how it seems like quite a number of extant human societies started out as the result of an unplanned and subsequently lost-for-millenia colony.