The program is not working correctly.

The program is not functioning properly. of a few trillion years there’s a very high chance that many of them will be much younger than us

It’s our first limited drop featuring our Cosmic Pioneer burbs and their Space Adventures only for a limited time on the Kutzkuzak shop. The universe is magnificent and vast, hundreds of billions of galaxies, trillions of stars and even more planets. If even the tiniest fraction are habitable, then the universe should be teeming with life and yet we see nothing, only vast emptiness. Where is everyone else? The answer to this riddle could be as exciting as it is creepy. We are early born before almost all other life, but very soon this may change. Not only might aliens appear, they could quickly surround us. An irreversible competition for the universe might be about to begin.

While this video is based on scientific papers, we’re presenting interesting ideas based on little data and lots of extrapolation, so take them with a grain of salt.

Okay, we need to look at three essential questions to understand the galactic competition.

  1. How fast can bacteria build spaceships to become a star-faring civilization? Life as we know it needs to master a number of very hard steps. It starts with dead stuff turning into the building blocks of life, then it needs to organize into self-contained cells. Those cells have to learn to work together to form multicellular organisms. This keeps going until complex creatures with big brains learn to use tools and language. Civilization has to be formed from cultures that value progress and technological development, and then they need to actually venture out beyond their home planet.

On Earth, life appeared basically as soon as the oceans formed, but then it took two billion years to make the step from single cells to multicellular organisms and 2 billion more for us to appear. Culture, civilization and space travel developed super quickly though. Do things always take that long or was this actually exceptionally fast? Also, passing One Step does not mean the next one is guaranteed. Multicellularity evolved over 25 times independently on Earth, but there’s only one species that builds spaceships. We don’t know how many steps life needs to pass and how long they take to give rise to a technological civilization, but there are probably many and it’s likely that on trillions of planets life has been trying for billions of years. Since we don’t see any other technological civilizations out there, it might well be that we are a rare exception. We might be among the first or even the first technological civilization in the Milky Way, but this is just one piece of the puzzle.

On top of that, we may have just hit the perfect time window. Why does Humanity exist now? The universe is already 13.8 billion years old, but it’s unlikely that many other technological civilizations had a chance to appear before us because in the earlier universe life would have had a pretty hard time to emerge let alone Thrive, because it was such a hostile environment. Early Stars constantly blew up, galaxies crashed into each other and supermassive black holes vomited massive amounts of radiation enough to sterilize galaxies over and over again. Our son was born right at the end of this Cosmic death show. The universe has never been more welcoming to life than it is now, so Humanity has arrived at a very convenient spot in time, maybe the earliest reasonably possible for life to thrive.

What about the future? The sun burns brighter than 90 percent of the stars in our galaxy and will keep getting brighter in about a billion years. It will boil all of Earth’s oceans and then become a giant that swallows it whole. So in the galactic context, the sun is very short-lived. Most stars are red dwarfs that can sustain habitable planets for tens of trillions of years. Life on these planets has an incredibly long time window to appear and pass the hard steps. Even knowing nothing about how rare or common life is, this makes it way more likely for technological civilizations to appear sometime in the future than in the past, because if civilizations appear at a random in the Milky Way within a Time win of a few trillion years, there’s a very high chance that many of them will be much younger than us.