The universe is 13.7 billion years old.
Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, and 1 billion years later the first life forms evolved.
The first Hominids evolved about 2 million years ago, modern Humans 300 thousand years ago. 12000 years ago we developed agriculture. Humans invented the radio in 1890, 132 years ago.
So humans have had the ability to transmit radio waves for 1% of the time we've had agriculture. Humans have had agricultural civilization for only 4% of our species existence. We as a aspecies have only existed for 0.086% of the time life has existed on earth. And life on earth itself has only been around for 26% of the universe's existance.
Even if we assume that life began at roughly the same point everywhere in the universe compared to earth( which is a huge assumption), that still leaves a huge margin for other civilizations on other planets to have evolved, progressed, and died out, long before we even evolved.
The odds that another planet developed sapient life which progressed to a technologically equivalent or superior level to humans at the same exact time that we did is incredibly unlikely, which I think is a far simpler explanation than the dark forest theory.
Edit: forgot to move the decimal over when converting to percentages lmao. Fixed now. Its still exceptionally unlikely, but the numbers I had were way off
that still leaves a huge margin for other civilizations on other planets to have evolved, progressed, and died out, long before we even evolved.
That's what Hawking argues, but his guess for why they're dying out is someone else nukes them when they detected.
The same math makes one wonder why aliens aren't here already.
There's billions of stars within a few thousand lightyears. If one of those stars was similar to earth, but cooled just 1% faster, they'd have had a million years to spread out or leave some kind of mark on the galactic neighborhood.
The universe is 13.7 billion years old. Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, and 1 billion years later the first life forms evolved. The first Hominids evolved about 2 million years ago, modern Humans 300 thousand years ago. 12000 years ago we developed agriculture. Humans invented the radio in 1890, 132 years ago.
So humans have had the ability to transmit radio waves for 1% of the time we've had agriculture. Humans have had agricultural civilization for only 4% of our species existence. We as a aspecies have only existed for 0.086% of the time life has existed on earth. And life on earth itself has only been around for 26% of the universe's existance.
Even if we assume that life began at roughly the same point everywhere in the universe compared to earth( which is a huge assumption), that still leaves a huge margin for other civilizations on other planets to have evolved, progressed, and died out, long before we even evolved.
The odds that another planet developed sapient life which progressed to a technologically equivalent or superior level to humans at the same exact time that we did is incredibly unlikely, which I think is a far simpler explanation than the dark forest theory.
Edit: forgot to move the decimal over when converting to percentages lmao. Fixed now. Its still exceptionally unlikely, but the numbers I had were way off
That's what Hawking argues, but his guess for why they're dying out is someone else nukes them when they detected.
The same math makes one wonder why aliens aren't here already. There's billions of stars within a few thousand lightyears. If one of those stars was similar to earth, but cooled just 1% faster, they'd have had a million years to spread out or leave some kind of mark on the galactic neighborhood.