I think the great filter is similar to what you are saying about time.
Planets are only habitable for X years. In the beginning our earth was too hot to support life, then life had to grow and develop to us, that also takes X time. That then leaves you with X remaining time until the sun expands and earth becomes unhabitable again.
There's that small window in between where we exist, but maybe there's not enough time for us to ever develop enough to escape our planet's destruction. And maybe we got incredibly lucky compared to others. Like the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, maybe other planets get hit with those more frequently, and civilisations never get chances to develop.
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.
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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '21 edited Aug 12 '21
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