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Mortal-Region t1_j9w0tqc wrote

Reply to comment by Cryptizard in Optimism in the Singularity in face of the Fermi-Paradox by [deleted]

>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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