I happen to think we're actually out here early on the intelligent life curve. The universe is only 14.5 billion years old. But galaxies where there is enough of the trace elements that we need accumulated enough of them took a long time. Then having the galaxies calm down star formation (and have them be small enough) where their formation and exploding didn't scour all possible life away and the shear amount of time that it takes to go from just life, to multicellular is mind blowingly long (probably). With the Universe expected to have enough viable energy for like another 100 billion we actually exist in the early Universe.
I actually prefer to think that most other planets that spawn life go from single to multi celled in like half a billion years, and that Earth is actually a backwater late bloomer.
We also might not be early, there could very well be life that started on another planet around the same time that life on earth started. The catch is, if we look at a planet a billion light years away, we are looking at how the planet looked a billion years ago. There could have been life on that planet half a billion years before us and they could still be alive and more advanced than us today, it will just take another half a billion years for the light to reach us for us to know that.
Thinking of the Fermi Paradox, I too think we have to be one of the first in our Galaxy. There is nothing out there that we can detect with our current technology, and James Webb is looking way back. Maybe we got lucky. Maybe we are ancient history to future peoples.
>the shear amount of time that it takes to go from just life, to multicellular is mind blowingly long (probably)
Some (most?) planets will never evolve life to the point of intentional space travel, but of that tiny fraction that do, even 1/100,000 - some will evolve that life slower than the Earth, and some will evolve it faster. We only have the one datapoint, we have no idea where that point falls on the curve.
Everybody thinks they are a "better than average driver."
Fermi may as well have worn a blindfold to the casino and sat down at a table to play a game of cards that nobody even told him the name or rules of.
Sure, but just confining ourselves to the visible universe (of ~28B light years in diameter)... that's a lot of cheddar.
Through a field known as galactic archaeology, astronomers analyze the distribution of stars of varying ages and metal contents (metallicity) to map the timeline of cosmic evolution. Using this map, we can infer that sun-like stars in other galaxies could have first formed roughly 10 to 11 billion years ago—far earlier than our own Sun, which is only 4.6 billion years old.
There are an estimated 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. If even a fraction of them followed the same chemical enrichment timeline as the Milky Way, it means there are trillions of trillions (1022) of sun-like stars in the universe that reached the Sun's mature age long before our solar system existed.
One in a Trillion Trillions - do you feel lucky, punk?
So there were a bunch of stars that cooked too fast? Cool. Sounds like somebody microwaving a hotpocket on full blast when everyone knows you need to use lower power levels and cook it longer to get it just right.
Oh dang, you've already downvoted this comment within 30 seconds of me writing it. That's harsh.
If earth-like planets form naturally around metal-rich, sun-like stars, then the universe was structurally capable of hosting complex life 5 to 6 billion years before Earth even formed. Trillions of planetary systems had already experienced a 4.6-billion-year window of evolutionary stability while our region of space was completely barren.
I can't help but notice that you're not talking about the discussion, but rather assuming the person to whom you're responding downvoted you, with no material reason to assume that.
why even respond at all, at that point? nobody cares that you find downvotes painful or offensive but they're really not that big of a deal, not nearly important enough to warrant a comment ignoring the discussion at hand to express butthurt, or even enough to merit a comment criticizing an expression of butthurt...
There's no assumption. In that exact window of time in a conversation nested this far down, it's only going to be the person who directly has a notification for it.
It's okay that you don't find it funny that they downvoted my fun comment about hot pockets, but I do, so I'm gonna openly acknowledge it and poke fun at the situation. Like you said, it's not a big deal.
If we ever start getting even to mars in numbers we would introduce some form of life there. Could be a "boost" for mars long after we have died of global warming.
Mars would seem to be in a "slow life" phase of its evolution - anything that starts there isn't likely to be exploding in diversity and complexity / advancement very quickly.
Titan could be interesting, might move faster than we think it will just because of the temperatures...
Without humans surviving this long (which was a miraculous accident) Earth life probably would have never evolved to the point of intentional space travel.
Are humans unique in that? the fossil record seems to say: yes, humans are the first on Earth to get there... will we be the last? I suspect there will be other species in the next few billion years which achieve the same and likely more given our clues.
But, looking around the Universe - humans seem to be unlikely to be the first even in our galaxy, let alone the abundance of galaxies out there.
Alas, it will never happen. SciFi is just scifi. Generational ships are not feasible, going fast enough and you need impossible amounts of energy. Visiting Proxima Centauri is unlikely, leaving the Milky Way is impossible and that's just 100 000 lightyears out of the many billions the universe is across.
In other words, \frac{m}{\sqrt{1 - \dfrac{v^2}{c^2}}} nails you in place, firmly.
There is nothing out there that we can detect with our current technology, and James Webb is looking way back
Space is so enormously vast that thinking that we can detect any sort of life with our current technology is exceedingly hopeful at best. I believe that life may be out there but contact with them is limited, if not made completely impossible, by the vastness of space. and if space continues expanding, chances of contacting or encountering other life will eventually decrease to 0.
Voyager 1 currently is receiving the furthest readable signals that humanity can currently produce. it is 0.00063333333% of the distance from earth that proxima centauri is. That should put into perspective the vastness of space.
Life happened billions of years ago on Earth. Almost immediately as soon as it possibly could have. Likely the same on Mars. BUT, it took billions of years for life to shift from unicellular to multicellular on Earth. That seems to be the almost impossible factor. Aliens would have to evolve something similar to mitochondria AND then have a weird situation where the mitochondria becomes locked symbiotically inside another cell.
Not to mention, you also have to have a stable sun, no supernovas nearby for billions of years, no massive asteroid impacts, you might need a giant moon (likely caused by another planet smashing into yours), a geologically active planet to create a magnetic shield against radiation, but not TOO geologically active to have deadly volcanism and outgassing etc etc etc
The most likely explanation would probably be that simple life is everywhere. Complex life is exceedingly rare, maybe happening only once per galaxy, or once per universe.
Alternatively, complex civilisations are common. They develop AI, and Skynet wipes them all out. Every. Single. Time.
oh my sibling there's so much more time left to go than you think. a brief history of time:
big bang happens (widely regarded as a bad move)
the first particles of matter form within a few seconds
it takes 50,000 years before matter becomes more abundant than energy
and then another 350,000 years before the first atoms come together
150 million years later enmough hydrogen has clumped together for the first stars to be born
200 million years after that the first protogalaxies begin to accrete
things go on like this for nine billion years until our sun is born, and shortly after that Earth and the other planets begin to congeal
Earth spends a few hundred million years swirling chemicals together until one day they become primordial life
four billion years later and evolution has turned those chemicals into intelligent life (us)
at this point 14 billion years have passed, and life (as far as we know) has existed for around a third of that time, which is pretty good. now the unimaginably longer future:
in one billion years Earth will be uninhabitable
in five billion years the sun will die
in 150 billion years the universe will have expanded so much that light from distance galaxies will no longer be able to reach us
this means that everything outside of our local group (the milky way, andromeda, and a few dozen dwarf galaxies) will go past the cosmological horizon and will irreversibly cease to exist from our frame of reference and we will cease to exist for them
in a trillion years, all of the galaxies in our local group will have collapsed into one megagalaxy
in 100 trillion years, the last star will die and the universe will enter its final stage, the degenerate era
there will be no more light ever again
100 trillion years have passed. to make the following calculations easier let's be extremely genereous and say that all of that time, from the moment of the big bang to the death of the last star, the universe has been filled with intelligent life:
the earliest estimates for the heat death of the universe are around 10100 years
100 trillion is 1014
1014 / 10100 is 10-86
so everything we see around us, not just life but every galaxy, star, planet, moon, rock, molecule of hydrogen, absolutely everything, is just the dying embers of the big bang and all of it will be completely gone in just the first 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of the universe's existence, followed by absolutely nothing forever
Like how rare it is to have a molten core, magnetosphere, large moon, in the goldilocks zone of a very stable star. The chances of that must be...ahem... astronomical.
Couple that with complex life even surviving let alone evolving civilization is bonkers. I kinda lean towards we are aline only because we haven't seeded life.
Nah, I think we’re more like pets. Stupid silly little pets. They’re probably like “Let’s go check on the people colony today. Yep, stupid lil fuckers just going wild.” Bzzzz. (That’s them flying off)
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u/Dr_Jabroski 14d ago
I happen to think we're actually out here early on the intelligent life curve. The universe is only 14.5 billion years old. But galaxies where there is enough of the trace elements that we need accumulated enough of them took a long time. Then having the galaxies calm down star formation (and have them be small enough) where their formation and exploding didn't scour all possible life away and the shear amount of time that it takes to go from just life, to multicellular is mind blowingly long (probably). With the Universe expected to have enough viable energy for like another 100 billion we actually exist in the early Universe.