In 4.57 billion years our solar system went from creating simple bacteria to a large group of species. Several of which highly capable of making fairly intelligent decisions, one of which capable of having the indulgence of believing that it can think. That’s us.
The sun has an estimated 5 billion years to go before it turns into a Red Giant that in its very early stages will wipe out truly every single idea that exists inside at least our own solar system.
Unless radio waves that our planet started emitting since we invented radio are seen and understood (which requires a recipient in the first place), that will be the ultimate end of all of our ideas and culture. Unless we figure out a way to let the ideas cultivate outside of our solar system. Just the ideas would already be an insane achievement.
But imagine going from bacteria to beings, colonized by bacteria, that think that they can think, in far less time than the current age of our sun. Unless, of course, bacteria somehow arrived into our solar system from outside (unlikely, but perhaps equally unlikely than us ever exporting our ideas and culture to another solar system).
Imagine what could happen in the next 5 billion years …
You seem to assume that our star was the first to form a solar system, and our planet was the first to have had the right conditions for biological life to form upon it.
One, or both of those are likely to be false. Given there are vastly more stars in our own galaxy, than the number of times left for the Earth to fall around the Sun, before the latter swallows us up, it is likely there are several systems with some form of life in them.
Also, some of our ideas, culture, and knowledge, have already left the solar system. And we may never know what has happened to Voyager in the vastness of space it was ejected into.
Voyager has only left our solar system, it has not reached another solar system yet. And for ideas to have arrived there must be a recipient capable of understanding it. Else it’s a bit like a Schrödinger’s cat in my opinion: it’s my opinion that an idea in transit doesn’t exist as such until a recipient understands it (its copyability nor receivability nor understandability is defined until all three happened).
But that’s more an opinion in philosophy than a comment on the technical achievement of Voyager (which is of course a remarkable achievement, all of the space-exploration stuff that mankind has done is mind bogglingly cool).
@pvanhoof
Great post! Thanks.
@dobey
You are correct that there might be some other planets in the universe capable of developing life. However, considering that it took our solar system 4.57 billion years to develop intelligent life while the Universe is only 14 billion years old, it is reasonable to assume that we are one of the first and that life in other systems is not that much more developed than ours. I wouldn’t be surprised if the level of development of life and intelligence in the whole universe is somewhat synchronized.
@Yegor: Unless life came from outside of our solar system, and that our solar system didn’t develop it entirely on its own ;-) (don’t ask me how it could have survived the vastness of space, other than hibernation or something — something of which I think we should investigate it, if we ever want to succeed in copying ideas and culture to another place in this universe, assuming that is a good idea)
Yegor, yes maybe civilisations are of similar age. Still this doesn’t matter much if you consider the huge amount of knowledge we gained within just 100 years.
@pvanhoof
True, my theory’s survival depends on the assumption that Earth life developed on its own :)
…too bad NASA’s budget is some measly $18.9 billion
You should read about The Technological Singularity.
I can highly recommend The Singularity Is Near, by Ray Kurzweil.
It will come to an end much sooner than that. There’s another ultimate limit for terrestrial life on this planet which is the temperature of the Sun. The Sun is getting hotter over time and in about 150,000 years it should be so hot that greenhouse gases will be so low and oxygen content so high that wildfires will burn up the planet’s surface. Oceanic life may persist just fine. Who knows? There’s another issue more immediate, however, which is the super volcano under Yellowstone National Park that is due to explode. It has the potential to derail this civilization, as you can imagine.
Arguing in comments is annoying. It is too slow.
But anyway, time is not relevant. It is a human invention to make it much easier to comprehend the vastness of our irrelevance. There is no universal constant. The universe doesn’t care if it’s your birthday. The universe simply just exists. There was an infathomable explosion, and now everything currently exists, does.
To say that something is impossible to happen elsewhere, simply because it did not happen that way here, is ignoring the possibilities of what exactly happened to cause life to come into existence, and evolve to where we are today. A few billion years here, could be a very short time on another planet. Life could have evolved faster. It almost certainly evolved entirely differently. Using Earth as a control for the vastly infinite number of variables involved, will only point at ignoring the infinite possibilites that could have happened elsewhere in the universe. And who is to say that our universe is the only one, or that everything we have seen in space so far, is the limit of our own? If the Higgs-Boson particle is the thing that exploded into everything around us so long ago, how can we be sure there was only one? There may have been a multitude, which all exploded into multiple universes. And if there were, what was previously containing them? If not, why only one? And where did it come from? Are we just a totally irrelevant side effect of a never-ending cycle of the expansion and contraction of our known universe, contained within some greater field, beyond our comprehension?
@DJ 150.000 years seems rather short. That’s just a minor tick on the geological time scale. Heck, homo sapiens has been around for about 200.000 years!
Perhaps you meant 1.5 billion years? The Wikipedia page on the sun talks about “one billion years”.