Comment by kakacik

Some form of life is probably quite common given the scale of entire universe, amino acids could be found in space for example coming from pre-solar times. If you understand what I just wrote you have to accept above as fact.

Now there are fuck tonne of filters we passed so far, may very well fail on next one (probably self-destruction), and we are lucky with so far stable good place for life. Given there are billions of trillions of planets, no way we are on the very top of that ridiculous number.

We may be one of the earlier civs but no way we are first neither. But how we would recognize a civilization that has say just a 1 billion years headstart? Dyson spheres are for fools ignoring dark forest stuff, not something really smart cautious beings would do. Matter holds enormous amount of energy, and there are other ways to extract it in a less obvious ways, ie black holes or probably some other ways.

Look at it this way - we are maybe building a small baby steps for one of big civilizations of universe. Still extremely primitive in all possible ways while arrogant enough to mostly not see it, but there is potential for true greatness. Otherwise we will perish, I dont see anything in between.