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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

I was idly looking at "age of universe", "age of earth", and "age of life" numbers and wondering something like this just the other day. The universe is only about 3x as old as life on Earth, and we've just barely gotten to the point where we can make noise nearby worlds can conceivably hear. Radio's a hundred years old. That's nothing on those time scales.

Look at this diagram of the size of the space that could pick up on our radio broadcasts with regards to the Milky Way: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2012/3390.ht...

If we get at all pessimistic about the likelihood of life happening, it doesn't feel like much of a stretch to imagine that we are some of the first ones. I would love to be proven wrong in this by having some advanced Elder Race show up and try to help us get out of this short-sighted, self-destrictive capitalist spiral we're in, but I'm not gonna hold my breath.

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To me the algae vs. alumnae solution to the Fermi paradox seems appealing. I.e. that life is common, but that intelligent life isn't.

Our sample size of one on Earth supports that. We have millions of species, but only one has evolved higher intelligence, and there's no reason to think that it's a successful evolutionary strategy v.s. say being a parasite.

    > [...]by having some advanced Elder Race show up
    > and try to help us[...].

Right, "help". I'm just going to let the history of how advanced civilizations have treated primitive civilizations here on Earth speak for itself.

We could also quote Blindsight by Peter Watts: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm Search for "Once there were three tribes." and read 10 paragraphs :) The key quote is:

> Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials— but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean.

Even easier, it's the second occurrence of the word "historians". :)

In the lists of "once's", we have: 1) proto-life, 2) single-cellular life, 3) multi-cellular life, 4) neurons (which eventually form brains), 5) enough intelligence to launch rockets. Now it is possible (maybe even likely) that other life on earth will develop human-level intelligence (not only other primate, but thinking of crows and dolphins too). But intelligence is rare enough that it takes a long time to achieve.

It's kinda mind-boggling to think there's a good chance we are the original Elder Race alien civilizations will write their sci-fi about.

s/"a good chance"/"a remote possibility"

Still interesting to think about this possibility.

>> It's kinda mind-boggling to think there's a good chance we are the original Elder Race alien civilizations will write their sci-fi about.

>> They're going to be mean.

Using the history of humanity as a reference, we will be the villains in the plot.

Damn straight. Only the good die young.

I just have an argument with your fantasy: Elder Races would capitalist, it's just simply a good way to designate effort towards different resources. http://www.americanteeth.org/2015/06/21/why-i-m-a-capitalist...

"Capitalism" may be a likely equilibrium for a system made up of interacting H. sapiens, but that doesn't generalize even to other somewhat comparable species on earth, let alone to entities we can't yet imagine. Why aren't the cells in our bodies "capitalist"?

Capitalism is a decent way to allocate scarce resources. It might not be particularly useful for an Elder Race that has long outgrown scarcity.

If we assume that life is common enough* that it will evolve independently multiple times in the future, then the chance we are "the first" is closer to that of being "the last", unless you have a convincing prior I'm unaware of. So it should be a pretty low probability.

Don't you think?

*Common in the sense of "easy enough to create", i.e. the macrostate corresponding to "life" can be made up of a very large number of microstates.

The first intelligent life to evolve will be able to colonize it's entire galaxy in a relatively short amount of time. The fact that Earth hasn't been colonized is pretty strong evidence to me that we are the first. To me at least.

Even if aliens chose to leave Earth alone for some strange reason, we still haven't observed any evidence of aliens elsewhere. No dyson spheres, no signals from space, no stars arranged in perfect geometrical patterns. Let alone visits from aliens, either to help us or hurt us.

Woah there, how do you support your first claim?

The Milky Way is about 100K light years in diameter.

100k years is tiny compared to the age of the universe. Even if their ships only travel a tenth of the speed of light, they could have colonized the whole galaxy in a million years. That's a third of the time it took humans to evolve from chimpanzees, and only a tiny fraction of Earth's total history.

Only if the intelligent species survives long enough to actually achieve those things. The more we advance, the easier it becomes to destroy ourselves. How many years till 3D printers are able to make nuclear bombs.

Well, yeah that's a plausible hypothesis. I tend to think the great filter is behind us. Most animals on Earth aren't intelligent, and it took a long time for humans to appear. But I did read something today about how a nuclear war almost happened at least a few times. Though I think that would only be a temporary setback, it would take an awful lot to exterminate us completely.

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