Just a reminder that if, for some reason, we discover technological civilization on that planet, it's very, very bad news for us as a species. I'm talking abou

Just a reminder that if, for some reason, we discover technological civilization on that planet, it's very, very bad news for us as a species. I'm talking about the Fermi Paradox. Basically, given all the stars we can see and that we see planetary systems around virtually every star we look at, then a decent portion of them should have rocky planets in the habitable zone. A portion of those should have the conditions conducive to life. A certain percentage of those will develop technological life. Each of these steps that reduces the likelihood of technological life is called a "filter" in Fermi Paradox parlance. These vary from small filters to so-called "Great Filters". The idea of a Great Filter is almost no species gets beyond it. All the heavy elements we have access to might be a Great Filter. As a reminder, anything heavier than helium is made in a star. Normal stars only make elements up to iron. It takes a supernovae or a neutron star merger to make elements heavier than this. So, for Earth to exist as is, there had to be a star relatively close to us that was the right size to basically go supernova. It had to be born, live and die before the Sun formed and that material had to be captured in our proto-planetary disk and ultimately become part of Earth. We have thus far found absolutely zero evidence of these alien civilizations so the question is why? If we find an equivalent civilization to us on a really close neighbour then by Bayesian reasoning, it means it's significantly more likely that a Great Filter is still ahead of us.