This is a good thought experiment to show how time is as vast as space.

400 million years ago is as distant as the stars. The Earth was a different planet then, in a sense.

It’s also yet another Fermi paradox answer. Even if our civilization lasts for millions of years, that’s a blip. We are searching both space and time and both are incomprehensibly vast.

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hdgvhicv 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How can a galaxy spanning civilisation fail. If life can spread to other worlds, unless you get FTL, how could you end all life in a galaxy

As such it seems impossible for life to have reached interstellar travel anywhere in the Milky Way before at most a few million years ago, otherwise we would see it.

Which is weird because life surely can’t be that rare in the entirety of space time.

Of course the galaxy could be teaming with non interstellar life, but once you reach mankind’s level of sentience and technology it dormant seem a massive jump to interstellar, and once that happens there’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle.

	▲	DFHippie 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Though there is likely life throughout the galaxy, it's probably difficult for one sentient spacefaring race to find another habitable planet they'd be comfortable on, i.e., one with a similar atmosphere and mass. If it's a long way from your planet to another you'd care to set foot on, you're left with lots of space stations. But who wants to live in that precarity?

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Razengan 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> time is as vast as space.

This is what I always say to "Why haven't we found any aliens yet??"

Hell, we wouldn't even have known about the existence dinosaurs, lifeforms on THIS VERY PLANET, if we hadn't chanced upon their remains.

	▲	api 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I’d also say that we do not know for certain that no dinosaurs, such as raptors perhaps, were intelligent enough for language and culture. At that age we can be pretty sure they did not have industry but they could have been like tribal hunter gatherers. If they did not build a lot and at large scale we’d have basically zero chance of finding anything. Stone, wood, animal skins, pottery, arrow heads, tools, etc., all that would be long gone. Metal would too but it might leave diagnostic traces, as would synthetic chemistry (plastics) or large scale fuel use. Birds, the modern still living closest relatives of dinosaurs, are often strikingly intelligent especially relative to their brain mass. Dinosaurs had small brains relative to body size but while there is a correlation there with intelligence it’s not perfect. There’s exceptions, animals with small relative brain sizes that seem very smart, like elephants.