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adbedient t1_iujlhbz wrote

Interesting theory.

The theory that I'm into lately is the Young Universe theory; the reason that we haven't seen other life out there yet is that we are one of the first to reach this evolutionary stage, so there aren't any others to see yet, as they aren't as advanced as we are.

That makes us the grandfathers of the universe, which is kind of scary.

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Aerosol668 t1_iujmlty wrote

We might be the babies of the universe. Advanced civilizations could have arisen and fizzled out millions or even billions of years before we existed. There’s no current consensus on how long it takes intelligent life to evolve and advance technologically. We only have a sample of one.

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cjameshuff t1_iujun6l wrote

And that sample of one actually shows that intelligent life can exist for evolutionarily long periods without advancing much technologically. We spent over 3.3 million years using stone tools. The Neolithic only ended about 6.5 thousand years ago. The period we spent slowly refining stone tools was over 500 times as long as the entire period from discovering how to use copper to landing on the moon. Whole new species of humanity evolved and died out in that timeframe.

And animal life had been around for about 500-600 million years before the first humans popped up. It took until a couple hundred million years ago for the first mammal-like species to show up. And there's evidence that single-celled life first showed up about 3 billion years before the first animals, about as soon as Earth could support it.

From that single example, it looks like a planet could potentially spend a very long time without animal life, with only non-tool-using animal life, or with intelligent life but very primitive technology, and that none of these steps are particularly inevitable. Or it could have gone much faster than it did here. Other examples, if we ever find them, are likely to have quite different histories.

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adbedient t1_iujtwqc wrote

Indeed we could be; this is the view commonly taken by most- and is why there is confusion as to WHY haven't we been contacted yet- if there is other life in the universe it would certainly have contacted us, yes?

But what if we are the first "house" in the galactic "neighborhood"- and we just don't have any neighbors yet. It is just as plausible a theory as any other that's been put forth.

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Aerosol668 t1_iuk0gek wrote

Advanced civilizations elsewhere wouldn’t even know we exist unless they’re less than 100 light years away. On galactic scales, that’s really close, yet so far away. It’ll take an age for us to be contacted.

Elsewhere in the universe, even just the next galaxy, won’t know we existed until long after we’re gone - unless we can can get off this rock, which seems unlikely.

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