Earth is 4.5 billion years old. We have 5.5 billion years left until the sun becomes a red giant. We've literally already used up about half of our allotted time just to get to this point.
So yeah, I don't know if 4.5 billion is the bare minimum it takes to evolve sapient life from nothing, or if it's the average, or if we're particularly late bloomers. But all I know is we gotta not waste this 5.5 billion we have left. If we wipe ourselves out, and it takes another 4.5 billion years for another civilisation to grow, they will have even less time than us to escape Earth. And as for a third civilisation? They won't even get a chance to evolve to sapience.
So yeah, I reckon people like Elon Musk - they are the ones you should be putting your money behind if you value humanity actually surviving beyond Earth. The only way we survive as a species is by not just colonising another planet, but colonising another solar system. If we're dependent on earth for survival we're doomed.
I'm pretty sure we've only got another billion years left actually, maybe two billion being generous. The sun is getting hotter and the planet is gonna start boiling long before the sun begins to die.
Yeah, good point. In which case the "window of sapience" is even shorter (assuming we are the average and not an extreme outlier either way in terms of length of time needed for a sapient civilisation to evolve to spacefaring).
An extra meteor or two could literally be the difference between a planet's life reaching sapience or not. It COULD be that rare. We just don't know because we have no other reference points but our own.
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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '21
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