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Comment by saganus | Hacker News Reader

Lately I've been thinking... however improbable this is, what if we are the first intelligent species in the Universe?

I mean, not saying that because I think we are special, but just wondering what would it mean if we were "the first" (for some relatively-local value of first)?

Are there any hard sci-fi stories about this? or has anyone given any thought about it? or would it be a very boring outcome?

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I think it ends up being a relatively boring outcome, because then it would very strongly imply that some previous step between organic sludge, and intelligent tool users is very VERY unlikely to occur. It would be good news in a sense, because it would imply nothing sinister about our future by comparison to past species, but it would be lonely.

In the best estimate, I suppose you've seen that version of humanity in the various "Ancients" or "Proteans" and other first races in sci-fi.

Conversely I've always wondered what the effect on the zeitgeist would be if we discovered the ruins of an obviously advanced civilisation.

Like an Earth-like habitable zone planet who's atmosphere was heavily contaminated with fission byproducts.

It would probably enforce the idea of The Great Filter[1]. It would also show that it's not uncommon for civilizations to develop similarly to humans. I would argue that the concept of war is a very human concept and doesn't necessarily have to apply to alien live which developed completely independently of Earth life.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

I think it would have less long-term impacts than many would like to thin. Human nature isn't so easily changed, and over time people who don't want to believe in the discovery simply won't. We still have flat-earthers and moon hoaxers, this needn't be any different. Even assuming that people believe it, when faced with the reality of the hard choices to be made in changing our course, how long would it take to rationalize the fear away?

Not long, I suspect, except for the usual people who would have been reasonably concerned before any such discovery.

Boring? I think that emerging as the first intelligent life in a universe this old is so unlikely that divine creation would be the only reasonable explanation. A whole new can of worms!

I think it's much more likely that other intelligent life is observing us.

I guess the alternative is the anthropic principle: we must be the first intelligent life otherwise we would have been destroyed by now.

Nah, but either interstellar travel has not been invented anywhere in the universe or there are more interesting/threatening things discovered by those who have invented it. Given that there may be a lot of intelligent life in the universe, isn't it a pretty narcissistic idea that we would be at all interesting to other life-forms?

We're a boring planet in the sticks, and we poisoned our planet with radiation. I'd bet we're in a list of planets to avoid.

It's hard to say exactly since we haven't detected life on exoplanets, and don't know yet how common it is, but just looking at this star system alone, we appear to inhabit an extremely interesting planet if you're a scientist interested in natural life-forms (both plant and animal) and geological processes. All the other planets in this system are utterly lifeless and barren as far as we can tell, and certainly don't have the diversity of ecosystems and climates that Earth has. The problem with this planet is all the humans ruining it, so I'm a little surprised some aliens haven't decided to wipe out the human pests so they can preserve this planet as a sort-of nature museum. That leads me to believe that the number of alien civilizations out there that have achieved not only spaceflight, but more importantly interstellar flight, is vanishingly small or even non-existent. It could very well be that there's no actual way of going faster than light-speed, so civilizations simply don't bother much with it, except maybe trying to visit their nearest neighbor stars (something we're still quite far from achieving), so if interstellar-capable civilizations do exist, they could be so rare that none have been able to travel here and find us.

This is well trodden ground. Start with the Fermi paradox: statistically there is a very large amount of stuff in the universe, so even low probability things like life should be out there, but currently don't appear to be.

The wikipedia page has a nice collection of reasons including yours: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

We might be the first or the most advanced (somebody has to be), but that doesn't preclude other lower species in other planets from existing, yet we have found nothing. And as being the first and only, well that's a universillion times less probable.

>Are there any hard sci-fi stories about this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question

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