Comment by nake89
16 days ago
That is one answer. Another possibility (the one I prefer, since this is mere speculation anyway) is that we are early.
16 days ago
That is one answer. Another possibility (the one I prefer, since this is mere speculation anyway) is that we are early.
We could be late too, it hasn't even been 200 years since we're technologically capable.
The universe is physically big, which means we'd have a hard time finding life even if it was going on at the same time as us, but add time to the equation and it's game over. There could have been a star trek tier civilisation next door that died 1m years ago and we would probably never know
If a civilisation spreads to stars then logically it will continue to spread (no technology or resource problems) and no event - not even super novas - could stop it (as events could only travel at the speed of expansion)
At that point you don’t have a single civilisation , you have thousands of functionally independent civilisations, with numbers increasing all the time. Sure something could wipe out a civ in one star system, but it couldn’t spread to others quickly enough to affect those others.
The most successful civilisations would continue to expand independently over time to take up all the resources in a galaxy.
Unless they found a way to travel faster than light, which means events could spread fast enough to collapse the civilisations.
Early as in we may have developed before any other civilizations? That's interesting. We're speculating of course, but what would explain us being the first after so much time – 13.8 billion years?
The universe was very hot in the beginning. It took a while for stars to form. Even longer for planets to form. Even longer for planets to cool down. The early universe was a violent place. Full of destruction. After the protoplanetary disk finally coalesces to planets and when planets finally stopped getting bombarded by meteorites, they could start cooling. In the earlier days of the universe there might have been intelligent life supporting planets wiped out by the chaos of the early universe. We might not be the first. But we might be one of the first. We might be early. The universe might have a bright future ahead of itself in terms of intelligent life. This is all speculation of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firstborn_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_and_evolution_of_the... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebular_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protoplanetary_disk
Now you could still say that surely there have been enough time for some advanced civilizations to form. And I would argue that we don't know that. At least we have not detected them, either due our instruments or unwillingness of the intelligent life to communicate to us.
There are of course many other explanations of the Fermi Paradox. But since its all unknown, its basically pick and choose. I choose to pick the nice option. There are however other nice options :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_exp...
Maybe we aren't the first living things to exist in the universe, but the first intelligent ones, and intelligent here meaning creatures with ability to ask these questions and make space probes to explore the universe.
Maybe intelligence isn't always a product of evolution. Even here on Earth, in the, what, 4 billion years history of the planet, humans are the only evolved creatures with intelligence as defined here. Maybe intelligence doesn't always occur.
A lengthy tangentially related post on my blog if you care -
https://www.rxjourney.net/extraterrestrial-intelligence-and-...
> Even here on Earth, in the, what, 4 billion years history of the planet, humans are the only evolved creatures with intelligence as defined here. Maybe intelligence doesn't always occur.
It is unlikely that other beings becoming intelligent enough to rival us and deny us the supremacy over the planet would ever be allowed. Homo sapiens are believed to have "contributed to" the extinction of several other modern-human-like species (one of them being the Neanderthals). How many other times before could something similar have happened, perhaps far earlier in the evolutionary timeline?
The only way we would allow sufficiently highly intelligent life to develop and flourish is if it is completely subservient to us.
The more entertaining answer from a scifi book. Aliens that developed earlier decided to become isolationist and wanted to stop young civilizations from blasting radio waves at them, so once a civilization became semi-industrialized, they chucked a planet killing rock at them.
I think that’s the question, is 13.8 billion years a lot of time, of not a lot of time?
Earth (and the solar system) is 4.3B years old, a bit more than a third of that, so it's not really that much time in comparison no?
If you assume the heat death as the end point, we're ridiculously early in the universe's lifespan.
Quite unlikely, but if there is a multiverse, everything is possible.