Yup we could definitely be The Old Ones in a galaxy that in a few billion years is interconnected by multiple intelligent star-faring species. This is not an unreasonable possibility at all.
More likely is that Der Trihs is probably right. I personally think the answer to the question “where the hell is everyone?” is “everyone is dead, and everyone will die early.” Whatever the odds of life forming in the first place is (already probably pretty low considering how hard it is to prove abiogenesis actually happened), the odds that a civilization survives long enough to build self-replicating probes to explore the galaxy and communicate between stars is 0, imho.
We would just change our definition for life to be less based on exactly the conditions arising here and the belief that there’s a hard, if any, boundary between life and non-life
Oh, I think that, once technology starts rolling, that the odds are pretty good that they’ll eventually get something like that going. The self-induced factors affecting our chances of reaching the 22nd century with our civilization intact don’t look insurmountable to me-a species with a slightly different set of priorities might not have ever let things get that bad.
The bottleneck occurs far earlier than that-there simply is a huge gauntlet of possible STOP signs for any planet to run before intelligent technological life can even have the ghost of a chance of arising, and even after that they’d still have to keep getting lucky as sin-if it isn’t an asteroid doing them in, it could be a supervolcano, or a geomagnetic reversal, or a gamma ray burst/nearby supernova, and probably a dozen other things which we couldn’t avoid even if we had a lot of advance warning that they were coming. You and I and everyone else on this planet essentially make Teela Brown look like a rank amateur.
We’re talking about the possibility of being the first, not saying no other sentient species could ever exist.
And, again, note that we can only begin our investigation of the universe from a “winning lotto ticket planet”. So we cannot take the existence of life here as indicating anything about the probability of life emerging, other than P > 0.
At this point I should say, if you ask me what my personal hunch is, I would say I think life is probably common, including sentient life. I just don’t agree that it is somehow irrational or odd to consider the possibility that (sentient) life is very unlikely and we are the first.
Right. And actually I think when it comes to war, humans may be on the bad end of the spectrum, because we are tribal. I think it’s quite possible for a species to be far more aggressive than humans but still not capable of the large-scale conflicts that we have had.
Imagine you have a jug, filled with black balls and white balls. You reach into the jug and pull out a white ball. How many white balls and how many black balls are there in the jug? What were the odds that you would pull out a white ball?
Thing is, there’s no way to extrapolate from “In one trial, I pulled out a white ball” to any sort of speculation about the number and distribution of balls in the jug.
A planet with life is a white ball, and black balls are the equivalent of planets in the goldilocks zone with liquid water, but with no life. We know that the jug contained at least one white ball before we pulled it out. But we don’t know anything else about how common white balls are until we pull out another ball.
The thing is, any species that can ask itself if intelligent life exists in the universe has to be on a planet where intelligent life evolved. That means that you can’t use the example of your own planet to estimate how common life is, because only planets with life on them can play the game.
It doesn’t seem intelligent life is so common that we can expect the Star Wars cantina anytime, ever. And when/if we ever do find intelligent aliens, they are likely to be really really different than us. We’re not going to be making buddy cop movies with them. “One’s a methane-breathing hermaphrodite slug from the frozen oceans of Titan who plays by the book. The other is a warm blooded omnivorous mammal from Earth who makes his own rules. Together they fight crime.”