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As far as I remember, the likelihood of a technological civilization forming before us is rather small. Basically we live in the goldilocks zone of our galaxy.

As far as I remember, the likelihood of a technological civilization forming before us is rather small. Basically we live in the goldilocks zone of our galaxy. Stars further towards the center are being constantly bombarded by types of radiation that make the formation of structured self-replicators almost impossible.Entropy rules. Stars further towards the rim have not yet gone through enough generations to produce the abundant heavier elements needed. We live in the zone that is both old enough and stable enough for technologically adept life to thrive, and we turned up on the scene about as early as we could. So we are probably just one of the first.

GoblinSlayer 3y ago
We are a late by random 100000000 years since the point of as early as we could, which is a pretty big error.
di456 3y ago
> So we are probably just one of the first. We don't really have any way to know that. Considering that there may be as many stars in the sky as grains of sand on Earth, there are many many unknowns. For another example we don't know for sure if our universe is the only one and it's entirely possible that everything that could ever happen plays out in real time across and infinite number of universes. We don't have any way to physically measure that possibility yet. We only have mathematical theories. Similar to how Copernicus proposed the heliocentric model, maybe our universe is not even the center of existence? It is humbling to imagine.
- adastra22 3y ago
  All those stars you see in the night sky? That’s an astronomical waste of energy. No technological energy limited civilization would let that waste continue, entirely unhindered. The fact that we don’t see the light of stars, or whole galaxies replaced by dim infrared waste heat emissions means either (1) new physics will point to free energy solutions that circumvent thermodynamic laws [unlikely], or (2) we are the first.
  - 317070 3y ago
    or 3) the assumption that advanced civilizations consume more energy is wrong.
    - vkou 3y ago
      Or 4) - interstellar mega-engineering is impossible, or essentially impossible, or it's ROI is negative. Which seems to be the most likely explanation to me.
      - midoridensha 3y ago
        The really advanced civilizations developed their technology just enough so they could build a really safe and reliable Matrix to live out their lives in.
        adastra22 3y ago
        They would still consume their local stars to extract and store the energy so their matrix can survive for trillions of years, rather than a few million or billion.
      - adastra22 3y ago
        We may not have the capability to build a Dyson cloud around our own star (yet), but we do already have the technology. You could do so with 21st century tech, and the ROI would be positive.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Even then, there are two issues: 1. disassembling the stars to make them live a thousand times longer 2. it only takes one expansionist civilisation seeking interstellar exponential growth — even if 99.9% of civilisations are quiet, that's just 3 digits of the 22-digit number of stars in the observable universe.
      - shuger 3y ago
- slfnflctd 3y ago
  Astrophysicists tell us that star formation will continue for 100 trillion years. We are indeed among the first simply because of the sheer amount of time left ahead of us vs. behind us. It's basic math. We are at 0.014% of the expected duration of this universe.
saiya-jin 3y ago
There are almost endless modes where life could develop in much more different and harsher conditions. More radiation? Well stronger magnetic fields for those. Too much space debris randomly popping into star systems? Have a big vacuum cleaner like Jupiter or two (or five). Not that common but if you have 500 billion stars many unprobable things can and will happen. Life as we see here on Earth is extremely adaptable. Give it harsh environment, and unless its too much immediately it will adapt and actually take advantage out of it (ie too much radiation? well we can mutate to our ideal desired form even quicker). Also, 1 billion years doesn't mean much in this cosmic scale. But imagine if civilization like ours had that much headstart. Well, you can't imagine, and neither can I in same way homo erectus couldn't imagine CERN particle accelerator or black holes.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  It's an even bigger gap than that. Homo Erectus takes us back around 100 million years. A billion years gets us to very simple multicellular life which can't do imagination at all. Or logic. Or thinking. Or creativity. Or much of anything else. So... a billion year old civ is going to have very fundamental abilities which are completely beyond our comprehension. It's like Dunning Kruger on a cosmic scale. Except that with Dunning Kruger there's usually some potential to learn a way out of ignorance. Here there isn't. Not only can we not do it, or understand why we need to do it, we can't see - never mind reach - the first rung of it.
  - bmitc 3y ago
    > So... a billion year old civ is going to have very fundamental abilities which are completely beyond our comprehension. Maybe not. There's no evidence that species can continually adapt and evolve to higher levels of intelligence. Humans are already hitting limits for how much we can think, figure out, etc. But by that same token, maybe so. Humans aren't exactly the cream of the crop when it comes to higher critical thinking and emotional intelligence. Is there any biological research that takes a look at a single or sequence of species maintaining civilizations lasting x amount of years?
bmitc 3y ago
> and we turned up on the scene about as early as we could. > So we are probably just one of the first. Those two sentences don't really mix. We have evidence that points to life forming basically immediately once the conditions are right. That means that for us to be the first, nowhere else in the galaxy and universe could have had the conditions. That just seems incredibly unlikely. Even in our own Solar System, other bodies like Mars had the conditions for life before Earth did.
- midoridensha 3y ago
  On top of that, Earth itself had the potential for intelligent life long before humans came around. But instead of evolving some overgrown monkeys, it evolved some overgrown birds who were too selfish and shortsighted to work together and develop a space program and watch out for large asteroids. They were mostly wiped out because of this, and it took 65 million years for another selfish and shortsighted group of animals to evolve and become dominant. Unlike the last ones, they developed a space program, but it's not really enough to handle threatening asteroids yet, but they're busy destroying themselves and their environment in other ways, so it may be moot. It might take Earth 3 tries to finally evolve a sentient species that becomes a spacefaring civilization.
  - WJW 3y ago
    With you until the last sentence. Why would the "third try" not just be dinosaurs again? Same for the 4th, 5th an subsequent "attempts". The fact that the second try got further than the first does not mean that the 3rd will get further than the second. In fact, given that most of the easily accessible coal and oil deposits will have been used up it might even be much more difficult for a subsequent species to get as far as humanity has. (Although that might be balanced a bit by lots of the metal ore being pre-mined and near the surface)
    - jagged-chisel 3y ago
      > ... most of the easily accessible coal and oil deposits will have been used up . There'll be plenty of time for nature to compact and bury much of the biomass from the previous sentience attempts.

GoblinSlayer 3y ago

We are a late by random 100000000 years since the point of as early as we could, which is a pretty big error.

di456 3y ago

> So we are probably just one of the first. We don't really have any way to know that. Considering that there may be as many stars in the sky as grains of sand on Earth, there are many many unknowns. For another example we don't know for sure if our universe is the only one and it's entirely possible that everything that could ever happen plays out in real time across and infinite number of universes. We don't have any way to physically measure that possibility yet. We only have mathematical theories. Similar to how Copernicus proposed the heliocentric model, maybe our universe is not even the center of existence? It is humbling to imagine.

adastra22 3y ago
All those stars you see in the night sky? That’s an astronomical waste of energy. No technological energy limited civilization would let that waste continue, entirely unhindered. The fact that we don’t see the light of stars, or whole galaxies replaced by dim infrared waste heat emissions means either (1) new physics will point to free energy solutions that circumvent thermodynamic laws [unlikely], or (2) we are the first.
- 317070 3y ago
  or 3) the assumption that advanced civilizations consume more energy is wrong.
  - vkou 3y ago
    Or 4) - interstellar mega-engineering is impossible, or essentially impossible, or it's ROI is negative. Which seems to be the most likely explanation to me.
    - midoridensha 3y ago
      The really advanced civilizations developed their technology just enough so they could build a really safe and reliable Matrix to live out their lives in.
      - adastra22 3y ago
        They would still consume their local stars to extract and store the energy so their matrix can survive for trillions of years, rather than a few million or billion.
    - adastra22 3y ago
      We may not have the capability to build a Dyson cloud around our own star (yet), but we do already have the technology. You could do so with 21st century tech, and the ROI would be positive.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Even then, there are two issues: 1. disassembling the stars to make them live a thousand times longer 2. it only takes one expansionist civilisation seeking interstellar exponential growth — even if 99.9% of civilisations are quiet, that's just 3 digits of the 22-digit number of stars in the observable universe.
    - shuger 3y ago
slfnflctd 3y ago
Astrophysicists tell us that star formation will continue for 100 trillion years. We are indeed among the first simply because of the sheer amount of time left ahead of us vs. behind us. It's basic math. We are at 0.014% of the expected duration of this universe.

saiya-jin 3y ago

There are almost endless modes where life could develop in much more different and harsher conditions. More radiation? Well stronger magnetic fields for those. Too much space debris randomly popping into star systems? Have a big vacuum cleaner like Jupiter or two (or five). Not that common but if you have 500 billion stars many unprobable things can and will happen. Life as we see here on Earth is extremely adaptable. Give it harsh environment, and unless its too much immediately it will adapt and actually take advantage out of it (ie too much radiation? well we can mutate to our ideal desired form even quicker). Also, 1 billion years doesn't mean much in this cosmic scale. But imagine if civilization like ours had that much headstart. Well, you can't imagine, and neither can I in same way homo erectus couldn't imagine CERN particle accelerator or black holes.

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
It's an even bigger gap than that. Homo Erectus takes us back around 100 million years. A billion years gets us to very simple multicellular life which can't do imagination at all. Or logic. Or thinking. Or creativity. Or much of anything else. So... a billion year old civ is going to have very fundamental abilities which are completely beyond our comprehension. It's like Dunning Kruger on a cosmic scale. Except that with Dunning Kruger there's usually some potential to learn a way out of ignorance. Here there isn't. Not only can we not do it, or understand why we need to do it, we can't see - never mind reach - the first rung of it.
- bmitc 3y ago
  > So... a billion year old civ is going to have very fundamental abilities which are completely beyond our comprehension. Maybe not. There's no evidence that species can continually adapt and evolve to higher levels of intelligence. Humans are already hitting limits for how much we can think, figure out, etc. But by that same token, maybe so. Humans aren't exactly the cream of the crop when it comes to higher critical thinking and emotional intelligence. Is there any biological research that takes a look at a single or sequence of species maintaining civilizations lasting x amount of years?

bmitc 3y ago

> and we turned up on the scene about as early as we could. > So we are probably just one of the first. Those two sentences don't really mix. We have evidence that points to life forming basically immediately once the conditions are right. That means that for us to be the first, nowhere else in the galaxy and universe could have had the conditions. That just seems incredibly unlikely. Even in our own Solar System, other bodies like Mars had the conditions for life before Earth did.

midoridensha 3y ago
On top of that, Earth itself had the potential for intelligent life long before humans came around. But instead of evolving some overgrown monkeys, it evolved some overgrown birds who were too selfish and shortsighted to work together and develop a space program and watch out for large asteroids. They were mostly wiped out because of this, and it took 65 million years for another selfish and shortsighted group of animals to evolve and become dominant. Unlike the last ones, they developed a space program, but it's not really enough to handle threatening asteroids yet, but they're busy destroying themselves and their environment in other ways, so it may be moot. It might take Earth 3 tries to finally evolve a sentient species that becomes a spacefaring civilization.
- WJW 3y ago
  With you until the last sentence. Why would the "third try" not just be dinosaurs again? Same for the 4th, 5th an subsequent "attempts". The fact that the second try got further than the first does not mean that the 3rd will get further than the second. In fact, given that most of the easily accessible coal and oil deposits will have been used up it might even be much more difficult for a subsequent species to get as far as humanity has. (Although that might be balanced a bit by lots of the metal ore being pre-mined and near the surface)
  - jagged-chisel 3y ago
    > ... most of the easily accessible coal and oil deposits will have been used up . There'll be plenty of time for nature to compact and bury much of the biomass from the previous sentience attempts.