Back to something I said earlier:

I stated that it would be more useful to describe a civs age from
their earliest ancestor, or from the beginning of life on their
planet, rather than just from when they began living in cities, or
writing, or traveling in space.

If you compare two civs, 1 has been around 10,000 years, and the
other is 100,000,000 years older, on the surface it appears obvious
that the older one would be astronomically more advanced.

However, if you say the two civs (or lifeforms or whatever you call
it) are 4 billion and 4.1 billion years old respectively, its much
less obvious which is more advanced. Evolution occurs in fits and
starts with long periods where no new advances are made.
Anthropologists believe mankind developed complex language (as we
think of it today) 60,000- 100,000 years ago. That is the blink of an
eye compared to the length of life on Earth, and is certainly the
most important development in creating a technological civ. The age
of the universe and 3rd generation stars certainly gives us a clue as
to how much life there should be in the galaxy, but technology is
another thing entirely. If conditions on our planet have allowed us
to develop just 1% faster than average over 4 billion years, which is
certainly well within the Bell Curve, then our compounded rate of
advancement could well put us far ahead of much older civilizations.

I've not had a chance to read the Rare Earth book yet, but there are
of course many things about our world that could have accelerated our
advancement further.

I choose to believe that there are other civilizations out there,
despite the fact that there is no evidence of them. Perhaps they
haven't discovered fire yet, but when they do, it will be in the
blink of an eye (a few million years) until we bump into each other,
if that's possible.

Either way, I hold out little hope of actually meeting or hearing
from aliens in my lifetime. I doubt SETI will find them, anytime
soon. But I wish them luck anyway.

doug

On Jul 22, 2006, at 21:45 UTC, Douglas May wrote:

> I stated that it would be more useful to describe a civs age from
> their earliest ancestor, or from the beginning of life on their
> planet, rather than just from when they began living in cities, or
> writing, or traveling in space.

Yet your own arguments demonstrate that this is NOT more useful:

> However, if you say the two civs (or lifeforms or whatever you call
> it) are 4 billion and 4.1 billion years old respectively, its much
> less obvious which is more advanced.

Exactly. Therefore, it is not nearly as useful a thing to say. What matters is when a civilization starts settling other stars, because that's when the exponential growth starts.

In addition to being not useful, describing a worldful of single-celled organisms as a "civilization" is also contrary to the standard meaning of the word. Words are useful for communicating only to the extent that we all agree what they mean; to take a word and start using it to mean something else only causes confusion.

> I choose to believe that there are other civilizations out there,
> despite the fact that there is no evidence of them.

But based on your abuse of the language, I interpret this to mean that you believe there are other planets with life out there. I agree -- I just don't believe any of them (in our galaxy) harbor *civilized* life.

> Either way, I hold out little hope of actually meeting or hearing
> from aliens in my lifetime. I doubt SETI will find them, anytime
> soon. But I wish them luck anyway.

Agreed (except that I still hold hope of finding out about them in my lifetime, but perhaps thousands of years from now -- I'm more optimistic about my lifetime than most).

Best,
- Joe

Joe Strout -- joe@...