Could we be one of the OLDEST civilizations in the galaxy?

On Jan 24, 2007, at 00:35 UTC, Jake wrote:

> On some of these points I agree.. Thousands or maybe even hundreds of
> other civilizations would be unlikely, and fits into your debate.. But
> why couldn't we have evolved because of the stage in which our galaxy
> allowed for it.. And considering that.. Why wouldn't others have
> evolved around the same time.. Give or take a few hundred thousand or
> maybe a million years or so...

Because it just doesn't work. Even if you assume that life couldn't
evolve on any generation of stars before ours -- and further assume
(incorrectly but conservatively) that no other stars of our generation
are older than ours -- you still have a 4.5 BILLION year time before
life evolved here.

So if we assume, from this one data point, that 4.5 billion years to
civilization is average, then what's the standard deviation of that
distribution going to be? A million years is way too short. That
would be a coefficient of variation of 0.1%, which is ridiculously
small for any natural distribution. More likely would be something on
the order of a billion years or more.

That's a strictly mathematical argument, though it holds for pretty
much every natural distribution. But there's a more intuitive way to
see it, too. Consider that 65 million years ago, dinosaurs were very
advanced. They lived in a competitive environment, just like our
homonid ancestors, and some of them were quite smart. Their evolution
had NOT stagnated; they were still developing in many different
directions. If the big asteroid hadn't hit, how long would it have
been until some of those smart little buggers developed culture, and
started making tools and working in groups to get ahead? A dinosour
civilization could have been building space colonies tens of millions
of years ago. The only reason that didn't happen was the pure dumb
luck of an asteroid strike before they were ready for it -- and that's
obviously not going to happen at the same time on every world.

And in fact, that's just one of lots of random events that have deeply
influenced the history of life on Earth. We (or something like us)
could have appeared hundreds of millions of years earlier, or later,
had things gone a little differently.

So, that means that if there are a lot of planets out there where life
got started 4.5 billion years ago, one of them is going to be luckier
than all the others. It's going to be several standard deviations
ahead of the mean (this is just how normal distributions work). And
that means it'll develop almost certainly billions of years before
average.

But more to the point, if you look at the several most extreme outliers
of a normal distribution, they are almost always rather far apart.
Look up, for example, the height of the tallest man in the world, and
the second-tallest man. They'll be much farther apart than two
neighboring members of the distribution close to the average.

> In the way you and a few others have
> explained it.. They would have to be super advanced to exist at all..
> If that was the case then how does that explain us??

The implication is that we're not only first, we're super-advanced
compared to everybody else. By the time they develop radio telescopes,
they won't need to be scanning the galaxy for 50 years... we'll be
right outside their solar system, if not closer.

Cheers,
- Joe

Joe Strout -- joe@...