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I like the theory that we're a precocious intelligent species. Like, although the universe is 13 whatever billion years old it takes a few cycles of suns going supernova to disperse the heavier elements to the point where a planet can form that will sustain complex life. Maybe the Earth is one of the first set of planets suitable for intelligent life to develop on, and although the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and there has been life on it for 3.7 billion years there has maybe only been multicellular life for about 500-600 million years. It took hundreds of millions of years for an intelligent species to arise once there was complex life and maybe even that was lucky, who's to say it doesn't "usually" take a couple billion years.
On top of all that, the universe is expected to continue forming new stars for another trillion years, so yeah, maybe we are one of the first civilizations at the dawn of the universe.
It's even more than that.
Imagine a dinosaur species was sapient, what do they use to fuel their industrial revolution? There might have a few scatterings of oil reserves but most of the fossil fuels we have were created at the end of their era. They'd have to jump from water power to nuclear.
We are in an incredible accident of timing and opportunity, and we're wasting the convergence of eons on a few centuries.
Good point! I'm just gonna riff on some of this for a bit cause it's fascinating. A sapient lifeform arising is not enough to guarantee a technologically advanced civilization. It blows my mind that there were stone tool making hominins over 3 millions years ago, well before the first human species. And the type of stone tools made by early humans didn't change for a million years. We take it for granted that technology inexorably progresses but does it even? A million years of basically the same technology. And then like you said, how many of our advances were dependent on external factors like the formation of oil, or domesticatable food animals, farmable plants, WOOD ffs, and on and on really.
And our species went through a population bottleneck at some point, homo sapiens have a strikingly low genetic diversity compared to many other animal species, some theories suggest there were only 2000 of us as recently as 75,000 years ago. We almost went extinct, and all the other homo species did go extinct, before even making it out of the stone age.
Also, jumping back to the formation of the Earth, a lot of assumptions about alien life developing rests on how many other "Earths" there must be but there is something possibly unusual about our planet. Our moon. Not just that we have a moon but that it was likely formed by a collision with a Mars sized proto-planet called Theia. We ended up with a moon larger than a planet our size should have. The collision also caused the Earth to tilt on its axis. So at a minimum without that collision we wouldn't have tides or seasons which seem like pretty important factors in spurring adaptations in life on Earth. Just having the extra mass helps Earth hold onto its atmosphere. Other effects of the Theia collision may include more water on Earth, more iron and other heavy elements, and more active plate tectonics/volcanism.
It's late and I'm not sure that last part makes sense after a couple rewrites but yeah, incredible accident and convergence of eons and whatnot for sure. Cheers.
Just thinking about this point for a second is really mind-blowing especially when you think about it with the added context that up until about 200-300 years ago, human technology levels were probably closer to the stone-tool wielders than it is to modern humans in an EV listening to music through a smartphone and navigating by a global satellite system.
Ooh that'd be a close call. Maybe though. I could see an argument at least. But at the same time... the 3 mya stone tool users were arguably closer to chimpanzees than modern humans, closest common ancestor being 6-8 mya. They probably couldn't make fire, didn't have language or clothes or make structures to live in. Even late stone age peoples were so much more advanced than that.
The agricultural revolution starting about 10,000 years ago would maybe be where I'd put the dividing point. Or bronze age 3,000 years ago?
But that might be underselling how much progress we've made since the start of the industrial revolution. I don't know, interesting to consider though.
About the rare huge-moon part - there's been a recent discovery of a pair of young, still-forming exoplanets sharing the same orbit in a young star system - "PDS 70"; one protoplanet is in the L4 or L5 "Trojan" LaGrange point of the bigger one. Physicists reckon Theia may well have formed in one of Earth's Trojan points, before being perturbed out onto a collision course by a third planet (thanks Jupiter)
So. While the planetary-collision-forming-a-huge-moon idea sure sounds wild, it might not be incredibly rare. Maybe.
We're still at the very early stage of knowing what is normal for solar systems.
Neat! Plug that into the Drake equation. Problem is everything in there is pretty much guesswork and estimates of the number of intelligent lifeforms capable of interstellar communication in our galaxy vary between 1 and like, 100 million.
I think that if it happened once it's bound to have happened many times but then where's the party at? Hopefully we are just early, maybe we can still be the host at least.