this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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I’m not surprised at all honestly
It sounds insane to say, but 13.4 or whatever felt way too young
“Feels” and “common sense”means little in science unless you have a mathematical or logical reason why you feel that way. I’ve seen far too many metaphysical theories try to be taken seriously to not point out that “feels” is useless, observation and math are what matter
And yet, some of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time were made based on people’s feelings and intuition. Fucking shocker I know right. I’ll bet you’re fun at parties.
Despite agreeing with your initial position, you sound like an asshole at parties and outside of them, too. If you need to posture and belittle to support your position, then you have no business trying to argue it in the first place.
Intuition can be a powerful compass to guide us to truths we haven't yet considered, bubbling up from our subconscious that contains the bulk of our brain's processing power. But the other commenter is right, it's not infallible. That same intuition in different people came up with all of science's knowledge (both the stuff that is currently believed and the stuff that has since been disproven) as well as all of religion's knowledge (assuming there isn't any higher being involved, which my intuition says there isn't but others' have come to different conclusions).
Okay, but the universe and our galaxy is really friggin' big. There very well could be other life out there, but is it intelligent enough to build spaceships? Perhaps. Has it figured out how to traverse the galaxy in a reasonable amount of time? I have doubts about that. Then what's the chance it would came across our own solar system? Pretty slim.
It also assumes that all life is as interested in exploring and expanding like humans are. I'd argue that the intelligent life that is most likely to survive to the point where it might understand that universe enough to travel it would be the ones that can be content with what it has rather than chasing a constant obsession with growth. We can see how that's going for us, where it got us here in the first place but also might get us to extinction.
I like the hypothesis that any civilization that gets close to entering a space based civilization ultimately destroys itself like we are currently doing even though we basically have a solution in the form of humanistic philosophy and nuclear power for clean energy
Double that is still weird. If the heat death of the universe is 10^100 years out or more, we're incredibly early whether it's 13 billion or 26 billion. That leads to one possible explanation for the Fermi paradox, the universe will have countless civilizations rise and fall over the eons, we're just one of the first, if not the first.
Granted that's just a thought that came to mind under the influence of an unexpectedly strong edible rather than actual scientific research, but it's still neat.
Well, it would be most logical for it to have existed forever.
For the last 13.7 billion years, we haven't observed matter/energy just popping into existence. In all that time, nothing was truly created from scratch.
So, it would be quite the exception to the rule, if that was different beforehand...