coupland's Journal: Humans are the only Highly Evolved Organism in the Galaxy

Based on my beliefs about evolution, the preceding headline must sound shocking. To clarify, I don't doubt that the Milky Way is teeming with life, however I think it's unlikely that there are any other highly advanced races in our vacinity. While I don't doubt others will appear, I suspect that we're the first. The reason is because of the exponential nature of evolutionary progress. To illustrate, here is a short timeline of history:

20 billion years ago - the Big Bang
4.6 billion years ago - Earth formed
4 billion years ago - origin of life
600 million years ago - Cambrian explosion
7 million years ago - Homo sapiens emerges
~6000 years ago - recorded history begins
200 years ago - man invents the steam locomotive
35 years ago - man walk on the moon

What this illustrates is that by far the vast majority of time spent on the evolutionary ladder is spent evolving into an advanced species. Once this is done, scientific advancement occurs at a frenetic pace. It took us 4 billion years to invent powered locomotion and only 200 years to travel to the moon. Even if it took another thousand years for man to visit another solar system, it would still prove the point that, in the grand scheme of things, interstellar travel occurs very shortly after the evolution of a highly advanced race. Since we've not seen space tourists buzzing about our atmosphere, this proves that no other races have reached this evolutionary stage, at least in our proximity.

The Universe Is Big

[Sloppy]

I won't launch into the whole Douglas Adams quotation, but it really is big. Yes, perhaps the time it takes to get from dumb life to interplanetary spacecraft is just a blip on the big scale of time. But what about the amount of time that it takes for interplanetary spacecraft to actually get anywhere? The distances are so vast, that even light takes a while. If a civilization spreads at sublight speeds, it could take a hundreds of millions of years before contact happened.

'Course, I can't account for

Re:The Universe Is Big

[coupland]

Yes you're absolutely correct if we assume advanced beings would base all space travel innovation on bigger and faster rockets. However man has already discovered the theory behind punching a hole in space/time to shorten the distance between two points to give the illusion of faster-than-light travel. We've even learned that the speed of light is not fixed -- it's possible to exceed it, you just can't exceed it when you average out the speed. And what about entangled particles? A hundred years ago rela

Re:Sorry to be the harbinger of bad news....

[coupland]

Well, I think the anthropic principle is completely irrelevant here -- it doesn't suggest that the universe is teeming with life, it simply explains why sentient beings see such order in the world they observe. The far more applicable principle here is Occam's razor. Which is more likely? That we have observed no advanced space-travelling civilizations in our vicinity because there are none, or they're all around us but they are hiding? In fact, your inflation theory only goes to support my hypothesis.

perhaps...

[smash]

.... those ufo sighting indicate we *have* seen other life forms buzzing about :D

smash.