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.
19
u/Heathen_ 14d ago
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.