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Cryptizard t1_j9vlbuz wrote

>which is statistically very unlikely

What makes you say that? There are multiple studies that suggest we are at the very, very beginning of the time period that the universe is able to support life. The universe is only 14 billion years old, and it will have conditions for life to arise for another 10-100 trillion years. Statistically, the overwhelming majority of lifeforms (99.999%) that will ever evolve will come after us.

We reached the advanced intelligence stage almost as fast as we possibly could. Our solar system was one of the earliest ones with abundant heavy elements. Life evolved very shortly after our planet's formation, less than 1 billion years after. It has taken us 4 billion years to reach the level we are at now. Our planet will naturally become uninhabitable in another half a billion years, as the sun gets too hot and we lose all the CO2 in the atmosphere. On a cosmic scale, we had a very small window to actually get the intelligence and civilization stuff worked out.

There is also the inflationary argument made by Alan Guth, that the number of universes is growing exponentially and so almost every civilization that ever arrises is the "first" one in their own universe. I'll let you google that one if you haven't heard it.

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Mortal-Region t1_j9w0tqc wrote

>The universe is only 14 billion years old, and it will have conditions for life to arise for another 10-100 trillion years.

Which begs an interesting question -- why so early? If the timeline is 7 meters long, why do we happen to find ourselves in the first millimeter? It gets even more acute if you allow for the possibility of digital civilizations. They'd survive the black hole era, so now the timeline is many times the diameter of the Milky Way. Yet here we are in the first millimeter. And that millimeter represents the entire time since the Big Bang. Considering that computers were invented less than a century ago, it all seems very fishy.

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Cryptizard t1_j9w1idt wrote

That's what the inflationary argument addresses. If every universe creates 10^30 new universes a second (one of the interpretations of cosmic inflation and bubble universes), then at any point in time there will be exponentially more "young" universes than old ones, and so almost every civilization will be the first civilizations in their universes.

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Mortal-Region t1_j9w2oaj wrote

But would it explain us being so early within the timeline of the first civilization?

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