• Illogicalbit@lemmy.world
    61·
    16 hours ago

    I read somewhere there are at least 6 possibilities:

    1. Dark forest theory - read at least book 1 and 2 of three body problem series or google for spoilers
    2. A filter exists, or more plainly something that always causes a civilization to eventually fail.
    3. Similar to Star Trek, other civilizations are waiting for us to pass a threshold before contact is made.
    4. Carl Sagan: the universe is so large and intelligent life is so sparse, we just haven’t come across them yet.
    5. Life on our planet is unique to the entire universe
    6. Could also be a mixture of some of these.

    Whatever it is, it’s a fascinating problem and I like Carl Sagan’s approach.

    • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca
      1·
      11 hours ago

      An addendum to 4:
      We could be one of the first, so life is unusually sparse during this period of time.

      The universe is old, but it takes a lot to build up the components needed for life as we know it. The first two generations of stars wouldn’t have created the exotic materials in quantitie we needed to seed a world with the requirements for life.
      And life couldn’t have realistically happened much faster in a 3rd generation system than it did in our system.
      There are some very old 3rd Gen stars, but it’s less common and iirc they’re not close to us.

      Tldr
      This is early phases, life is going to get more common over the next few billion years.