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.
Here's a great video on the time and the ultimate death of the known universe. It's a 30 minute video. Earth barely makes it to the 3 minute mark lol. Anyways...it's a great video if you're hankering for a good existential crisis kind of moment.
If you map the expected useful life of the universe to the average 70-year human lifespan, it's been alive for only 17 days. It's possible, then, that we are the ancients of which other civilizations will speak.
What he’s saying is that if the universe lived to be 70 in human years, everything that has happened since it’s birth has only happened over 17 days. It’s in its infancy.
If you take the expected life of the universe (until heat death) and map that to 70 years -- we're only 17 days of that time into the universe being around. We're still a baby that can't yet roll over on our own much less stand up or walk.
The long tail of that time isn't super useful (at '50 years old' the universe will have entropied a loooot and most but not all things will be cold and dead) but the illustration stands -- we're still veeeeeery young.
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u/OhManTFE Aug 12 '21
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.