New JWST results show we’re on a path to finding alien life
bigthink.com
bigthink.com
which says that K2-18b is 120 light years away, in the Leo constellation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_(constellation)
If JWST finds life, that changes the Drake equation. It means civilization/intelligent life is either extremely improbable, or (more probably) extremely unstable and fleeting. Our odds would not be good.
If it finds nothing, that just extends the uncertainty for a long time.
Earth as it is right now is in a fleeting transition period on cosmic timescales. It seems unreasonable to assume other extraterrestrial life that evolves to be intelligent/space faring would stay in that state for millions of years.
The universe is 13.8 billion years old, and lets assume it was only "inhabitable" more recently. So if there is any intelligent life within ~500m lightyears, we should probably know about it, because they would have spread out to Earth by now.
If primitive life is "common: in every galaxy (aka detectable by the JWST right now), then the ascendance to intelligence would have to be extraordinarily uncommon for spacefaring life not to spawn. I find this unlikely based on Earth's history, which would mean intelligent civilization is extremely likely to "burn out" before it spreads over the stars enough to be visible, or there is some other likely-not-good reason why we can't detect abundant spacefaring life yet.
1. We couldn't have gotten to where we are without fossil fuels and a bounty of oxygen in the air (but not so much to be dangerous). So the conditions and time scales may not be so simple or average.
2. You're pesuming hyper-intelligent races even have the desire to spread themselves like a plague into the universe. Resources are distinctly finite, why waste unfathomable amounts of energy and labor "exploring" pointlessly when, instead, most of the population can just digitize themselves and live in an eternal, simulated heaven as they sip on resources slowly and only expand when absolutely necessary. This also minimizes the risk of encountering aggressive neighbors.
Sending out von Neumann probes would be very cheap, and logical to offset that risk of aggressive neighbors.
>why waste unfathomable amounts of energy and labor "exploring" pointlessly when, instead, most of the population can just digitize themselves and live in an eternal, simulated heaven as they sip on resources slowly and only expand when absolutely necessary
If future civilization is "unified" into a single intelligence, perhaps it would only want to probe instead of expand. But if its non-homogenous groups, which seems possible, its inevitable that some would wish to move/expand for the same reasons they have throughout history.
You might be right about initial conditions.
It took a third of the age of the universe for intelligent life to evolve on Earth. Just think how rare it must have been to have a life-supporting planet and not gotten destroyed by a celestial event for that long.