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Technically that 20% applies to both life and intelligent life. Of course I'm just playing devil's advocate -- there would certainly be fewer instances of intel

Technically that 20% applies to both life and intelligent life. Of course I'm just playing devil's advocate -- there would certainly be fewer instances of intelligent life than life. We believe it took >4 billion years for intelligent life to evolve whereas life took hold pretty much immediately upon planet cooling. But it did happen, and we have a number of species of different Orders that are somewhat intelligent and able to use tools (crows, octopi, primates, dolphins), and it only took us ~5 million years, the ability to free our hands to manipulate things, and some natural disasters to get from where they are to where we are. As you suggested, it is unlikely that a futurist from a newborn civilization would accurately predict what a million (or billion) years old advanced civilization would actually do, and I am also legitimately unaware of whether we have any reason to believe that such projects would be visible when we can barely make out the closest planets outside our solar system (and only indirectly via math). Or if someone blotted out an entire star, how would we know? We use a term called dark matter to fill in the 75% of the universe that we can't describe in conventional terms. As some people posit on this subject, do animals in a nature preserve know they are in a nature preserve? Doesn't look much different than their world did thousands of years ago aside from occasional ufo's flying overhead (planes) unless they stray toward the edges/out of the solar system. Btw, I would have been one of the skeptics writing these comments three years ago pre-Nimitz release (in fact, if you go back far enough in my HN history I found some comments saying that if there was a greater intelligence it would just ignore us LOL https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=lend000&next=14186346 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=lend000&next=1418634...). If you study this incident and a whole plethora of other phenomena with an open mind, you'll find some pretty damn fascinating things from various places with different agendas and levels of credibility (it is certainly not 0 evidence) with significant implications.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
> it is certainly not 0 evidence It is evidence of something going on that we do not understand. That does not immediately mean aliens any more than it immediately means magic or god.
- lend000 7y ago
  Perhaps they are all the same thing ;) Skepticism is important to keep discussion grounded, and I appreciate the level headed discussion. To me, finding something that breaks our understanding of reality is just as interesting and worth pursuing aggressively regardless of which of the above explanations is most correct.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    On that point I would agree, and the speculation is fun, but it is useful to keep in mind that explanations for mysterious events are almost always boring and mundane.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

> it is certainly not 0 evidence It is evidence of something going on that we do not understand. That does not immediately mean aliens any more than it immediately means magic or god.

lend000 7y ago
Perhaps they are all the same thing ;) Skepticism is important to keep discussion grounded, and I appreciate the level headed discussion. To me, finding something that breaks our understanding of reality is just as interesting and worth pursuing aggressively regardless of which of the above explanations is most correct.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  On that point I would agree, and the speculation is fun, but it is useful to keep in mind that explanations for mysterious events are almost always boring and mundane.