Haven’t had that thought, but the total opposite. What if it’s hella early, and we’re still the most advanced lifeform in the universe? We’re over here writing stories and making movies and games about aliens more powerful and technologically advanced coming here and fucking us up, when in reality we are the advanced aliens and everyone else in the universe is either barely sentient or still cavemen in terms of evolution and technological awareness.
The universe is too young for that to be likely.
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No but we can estimate the total age before cosmic inflation renders the universe cold and so far spread out so as to be considered “dead”
That timeline is around 10^27 years, of which we only right now have been around for about 10^9. So we are VERY young compared to the max age. On the cosmological timescale, we are still “being born”
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Another factor is estimating the total amount of hydrogen available to form new stars. The last estimate I heard was nine times as much as is currently bound up in stars.
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Yup, all the evidence scientists point to agree that if anything we are early to the party.
It’s wild to think that we may be what aliens call “the elder races” or “precursors” or something like that, depending on if we survive that long.
A simple counter idea to this can be summarised in one question; Why have we not made an effort to introduce ourselves to ants?
Hey, I introduce myself to ants and other creatures regularly. Most of them ignore me. Of those that don’t, either I’m warned off or bummed for food.
I’d think of it like this…
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The universe is ~13 billion years old. However for the first few billion years, the universe was a wildly dangerous place to live. A sea of Hydrogen generating Supermassive stars, exploding within just 100,000s/millions of years, and generating many of the heavy elements that exist today. Even if a planet could form in these conditions, chances are it would’ve been annihilated before life could develop.
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I don’t know exactly when the universe started to “stabilise”, but let’s say there is ~10 billion years of time that a planet like Earth could’ve formed.
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The Earth is ~4.5 billion years old.
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Single-celled life arose ~3-4 billion years ago.
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Complex multi-cellular life arose only ~500 million years ago during the Cambrian Explosion - so much needs to happen for complex life to arise that it could take a long time even in the best case scenario.
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Humans arose only ~100,000 years ago… albeit had the dinosaurs not been around for so long, we could have come about maybe 10s of millions of years earlier.
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From there basically everything comes down to how long it takes for a race to figure out farming, adopt a sedentary lifestyle that allows development of non-survival related disciplines, and to industrialise.
In the case of humans, the oldest cultures are around 10,000 years old, and we industrialised only a couple hundred years ago.
If we make the assumption that we’re not exceptional amongst any intelligent lifeforms, then it would make sense to assume that it takes roughly 3-5 billion years for a race to reach where we are now.
That means we could be late to the party, and everyone else has already wiped themselves out, but it’s just as likely we’re right in the thick of it but just too far away from anyone else in our cohort to see anything, and vice versa.
It’s basically just the Fermi Paradox - and the only way we get an answer is when the void answers back.
Didn’t we just get new evidence from JWST+Hubble that the universe may be as much as twice as old as we thought - or ~26bn years?
That relies on the “tired light” hypothesis being correct. It solves a number of problems, in a more elegant way. However, it also requires explanations for some new mismatches. E.g. why the cosmic background radiation doesn’t seem to have aged the same way.
It’s a theory that can’t be immediately dismissed, which makes it interesting, but it’s far from proven. Scientists can now look for details that would differ between the 2 models, and so help clarify what is happening.
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Evolutionary biologist here. I think it’s highly unlikely.
It has taken about 4 billion years for intelligent life to have appeared on our planet (if you include the earth forming part), or 3.5 billion years (if you include when life first formed) to get our first “intelligent life.” By intelligent life here, I’m talking about technology in tool using and civilization building, to be clear. It’s a label I’d apply to our many of our ancestral and most closely related species. I believe much of life on earth is intelligent to the point of having things like theory of mind (the knowledge that one is a thinking individual interacting with other thinking individuals), including some birds and octopuses. The birds and octopuses part is important because it means that ToM evolved multiple times independently. That means that a) it’s a “good idea” (it has potentially significant adaptive value) and b) it’s possible to discover it along multiple pathways. Take eyes for example. Last time I looked, we believe eyes have evolved independently at least 24 times. They also exist at every stage of complexity and in a very wide variety of forms, and even something as as simple as being able to tell light from darkness has value.
However, in that 3.5 billion year history, intelligent life evolved exactly once, from a single line of descent. Intelligence such as ours is obviously a good idea. We went from being relatively unremarkable hominids to being the dominant life form on the planet, for better and for worse. Evolution is not moving all species to intelligence. Humans aren’t the point of evolution, any more than sharks or jellyfish are the point of evolution.
When such a manifestly good idea only evolves once, from a single line, the conclusion is that it’s pretty difficult to evolve. It might require a chain of preliminary mutations, or a particular environment. Being hominids, for example, we can make tools and carry fire, which dolphins and octopuses cannot. Of course, there are other hominids out there who do not do those things, and they’ve been around for millions of years. Depending on where you want to start the clock, they’ve been around for about ten times longer than modern humans - about 400k years, give or take. And the technology and civilization part has only been around for the last tenth of that, and has to evolve along its own, non-biological selection - and even those things differ wildly between different places and cultures. And even will all that, it’s become increasingly obvious that this might be a terminal mutation as the very drivers of our short term success may lead to our extinction.
I believe that extra-solar life probably exists. Whether it exists as bacterial mats or multicellular life, whether it’s discovered its own form of photosynthesis or has some other way of gathering life from its environment, whether it draws a distinction between its informational (eg, dna) and physical components - I have ideas but obviously no data.
In any case, that’s why I don’t believe that anyone has ever seen an extraterrestrial-origin ufo. I don’t believe the universe ever was nor will ever be teeming with civilizations.
All of that said, though, we’re dealing with an n of 1. We can make the best inferences possible based on what we can observe, but I would be delighted to be proven wrong tomorrow. I’m a sci fi nerd - I want there to be aliens. Even the discovery of a bacterial mat would revolutionize biology.
Intelligence such as ours is obviously a good idea.
Is it though? And does an actual intelligent species destroy it’s own habitat and make life harder for future generations? I’d think an intelligent species would do just the opposite. We’re not intelligent, we’re adaptable and clever.
I kind of close with that thought. A “good idea” in evolutionary biology is one that leads to reproductive success. Obviously, it’s possible to have so much reproductive success that you overrun the carrying capacity of your environment. That doesn’t happen as often when we’re looking at them in their natural environments - because species and environments co-evolve, and so each adaptation has time to be matched by other adaptations.
It’s always tempting to look backward through time and interpret a direct causal development from the bow and arrow to industrial manufacturing and spaceflight. But we can see by looking at all of the different societies and cultures around us that any particular path isn’t dictated by the human brain per se. The Yanomami and the Yoruba are populated with people exactly as intelligent as in any other human society. They are adaptable and clever, but never developed mass manufacturing or rocket technology. There are countless other civilizations that arose, gained a high degree of sophistication and power, and then disappeared while others have survived.
I do not believe in free will. That means I believe in strict causality. If you wanted to argue that the development of modern western political economies are a direct result of the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment itself was a direct result of the world of ideas that came before it, you’d find a sympathetic ear (although I do believe that determinism is different from predictability, and that this complex system we call our society is more complex than any individual just as a human is more complex and less predictable than an ant).
In any case, it’s possible the “lethal mutation” that might lead to our demise (along with a good swath of the rest of life on earth) might have been a techno-cultural mutation rather than a biological one.
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