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Another day, another instance of someone saying "Stephen Hawkings" or "Jony Ives".

The biggest impediment in my mind to alien contact is time. Intelligent life could have evolved any time in the past 13 billion years or any time in the next googol years. The probability that we would cross temporal paths in our few thousand years of viable existence seems low.

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Thing is, we don't actually know what the half life of an intelligent species is. Civilisations? Yes, in the case of ours, but simply taking our species as the sample could get us a number that could be magnitudes off.

Exactly, other life would be a minimum of a million years ahead of us or a million years behind. Using earth as a reference. Life has been on earth for 4 billion years, and nothing remotely interesting until the last 0.5 billion years. All of human civilization has occurred in the last .000012 billion years.

From our perspective 'Alien life' will be either the faintest traces of ancient ruins or pond scum.

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