>>13144291>DEFINITELYwhy?
it's not impossible that we're just the first.
the universe has only been around for about 14 billion years, give or take. earth has been around for 4.5 billion, and as i've heard told, life began pretty much immediately, as soon as the planet was cool enough for water. about 3.8 billion years ago. to me, that rules out panspermia right away. it seems very unlikely that extraterrestrial seeding would coincide with the first water formation on earth, doesn't it?
anyway, it took 3.8 billion years - give or take however much you like and it'll still be a long fucking time - for life to develop into intelligence. a very crooked path, too. many extinction events, many formative moments, and they all seem to have been required for us to exist. if we think life might be rare, that even microbial life might be rare, then it seems to me that intelligent life would be almost nonexistent, given how difficult it was for us to finally arrive. and i think we may even be able to assume that the conditions prior to earth's formation in the universe may have been too chaotic for life to last that long.
we may not be the first in the entire universe, but i think it wouldn't be farfetched to suggest that we might be the first in our local group. if that's the case, we wouldn't see any ancient alien civilizations. we are the ancient civilization. unless, of course, the UFO schizos aren't schizos.
tangentially related, i think we should start seeding life everywhere we can. if there's nothing in titan's seas, then we should plant some waterbears down there. get things going. lodge a bunch of microbes in some rocks and start flinging them at other stars. make the future more interesting, for whoever's around to witness it.
