General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Are we humans an evolutionary mistake? [View all]exboyfil
(17,862 posts)but some compelling things make me think that technological life is exceedingly rare.
1. The run of the dinosaurs. None developed even rudimentary tool use over the the span of 160 M years.
2 In most cases the available time window is 8 billion years or so. We used up nearly 2/3rds of our time getting to this point. Now you can argue that red dwarfs extend that window immensely but given that goldilocks planets are going to be tidally locked and subject to significantly more EM radiation - I have to wonder.
3. Our species passed through a series of keyhole events (as well as the planet). Any one could have spelled doom for us reaching a state of technology.
4. The need to be a 2nd or 3rd generation sun so that our solar system would possess higher periodic elements. We may be at the top of a wave of technological civilizations to follow.
One interesting book I read about five years ago is Rare Earth. Before that I was a Star Trek kind of guy seeing the possibility of civilizations every few light years.
Still I think we should continue to look, and I would be exceedingly overjoyed if we detected another technological civilization.