Radio waves take time to travel; there could be many civilisations out there whose signals haven't had time to reach us.
If that's the case, we're just the first intelligent civilisation to evolve in our immediate vicinity.
It's far more likely that signal-emitting life is so rare (or short-lived) so that they are separated by distances where their signals weaken to undetectability, than that we are the one fantastically lucky star to be the first among a hundred billion.
Star Trek showing all the rival civilizations exploring the galaxy at the same time makes no sense at all. It's far more likely that civilizations would arise separated by time of millions or billions of years, than that they would all be concentrated within a few centuries. (Trek does hint strongly that the explanation is panspermia, that life was seeded everywhere at the same time to account for the time-concentrated development.)
What we don't know is what makes signal-emitting civilizations cease to do so. But (if we aren't the fantastically unlikely first one) either something must, or they're so far apart that signals can't be detected between them.
The universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old. Primates evolved only six million years ago. So let's be charitable and say it took only 13 billion years for a lifeform capable of transmitting radio waves to evolve.
Unless I'm missing something, if we're listening for ETs, we would only have visibility into a sphere with a radius around 1/45th the radius of what is out there?
My point is, if the Universe is such that it takes a minimum of, say, 10 billion years for planetary conditions to make evolution possible and evolution to wind up at intelligent life, then there could be hundreds or thousands of civilisations out there, at this very moment, whose earliest signals won't reach us for millions of years.
It's at least 4b years old on earth, that's not "relatively recently"
We've been technologically capable for less than 200 years, that's nothing in the grand scheme of things.
We could have just missed them by a few millions years and we would have no ideas at all. There might be 10 ancient Egypt tier civilisations out there right now that might develop radio tech by the time we're extinct or back to low tech.
As Lynn Margulis would say the chimps aren't the main show. Intelligence maybe an over rated and very buggy feature of Life. And the bugs get amplified as the minds interact with each other and group size increases.
The philosophers have talked about the bugs for a long time (see Plato's chariot, Hobbes passion vs reason, Freuds id-ego-superego, Kahnemann's system 1 vs system 2, Haidt's Elephant Rider). The mind needs stories to handle the bugs. And there is no dearth of stories on Earth to keep the 3 inch chimp brain occupied forever.
If there were no eukaryotes, there'd likely be no way of getting past the energy per gene ceiling that constrains the other two domains of life.
~5% matter and energy. The stuff you and I, dollhouses, dogs, and sugarcubes are made up of. Of that about 99.9% of it is very hot stars.
~20% dark matter. This is currently under investigation, but really all we know about it is that it is incredibly sparse and falls down.
~75% dark energy. We know nearly nothing about it except that it falls up (?!)
Point is, if there are other civilizations out there, and they have been existing for even a few thousand years longer than our has, a cosmic eyeblink, they are probably not just using matter and energy anymore. Heck, their understanding of physics is so much more than ours, even comparing us to Plato and them to Devoret is an insult.
It is hardly inconceivable that another world might offer an abundance of energy and materials so vast that the primitive notion of competition becomes irrelevant – an absence that would, I imagine, deeply offend the instincts of Earth’s more belligerent inhabitants.
Unless humanity is prepared to extricate itself from its parochial assumptions and entertain the possibility of wildly divergent modes of existence, it is unlikely we shall ever encounter a species with whom a meaningful exchange is even possible. Worse still – though entirely within the realm of plausibility – we may one day confront a civilisation whose moral and ethical framework is so colossally alien to our own that the mere act of contact would not enlighten, but unsettle, fracture and shatter.
I would push back on the idea that alien civilizations might somehow be more enlightened so as to avoid internal conflict altogether. Unless they were artificially designed by a creator who explicitly factored out these traits, they likely also evolved from primitive beginnings. If we know anything from our single sample of living organisms is that competition and survival play a key role in driving evolution. Even if their planet had ample resources for everyone—which can also be said about Earth—those resources might not be accessible to everyone equally. This would inevitably lead to hoarding, tribalism, and conflicts. Besides, physical resources aren't the only cause for conflict. If they're social creatures, relationships, hierarchies, and politics also play a role.
So all of these things would be embedded in their organisms even after they've evolved to a technological civilization, just like they are in ours. Therefore it is not difficult to imagine that they would also struggle to balance their use of technology with their nature to distrust each other. I don't think this is a human-centrist viewpoint, but one we observe from nature itself. However limited that may be, it's the only place we can draw any kind of conclusions from. Thinking otherwise is interesting, but the realm of science fiction.
That paper used a horribly faulty logical argument because it has been well known for quite a while that most of the time evolution is quite slow, but there are short bursts of rapid change. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion
I'm pretty sure the issue you raise is averaged away quite neatly by the math.
The aliens are probably out there wasting time on social media and saying stuff like We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.
No reason to spend money on searching "aliens"
just look near Cuba.
"Can advanced beings evolve beyond the need for civilization?"
Future Star Trek episode:
The crew arrives at what appears to be a completely lifeless planet, and sees the empty buildings of a futuristic city...
Crew member: "These warlike people must have annihilated themselves... nuclear war with advanced energy devices that penetrate buildings with high energy radiation, that leave the buildings but destroy all life..."
Beings in light bodies (who suddenly appear out of nowhere!): "No, it's totally cool -- all of us are still alive! We simply evolved beyond the need for civilization!"
Dumbfounded crew member (whose sociologic theory about civilizational collapse is now proven utterly and completely wrong!): "Oh..."
:-)
We have a head start on other apes, but they might catch up if we weren't in the picture. If octopi stopped dying so young, they might give us a run for our money. Orcas have fashion trends ("did you see Becky's dead salmon hat? I'm getting one of those!"). Mess with corvids at your own risk.
The control of fire is what has enabled humans to produce and use new classes of materials that all other living beings are unable to make, e.g. ceramics, metals, glasses, cements, thermoplastics and thermosets, various kinds of crystals, including semiconductors, etc.
These materials have been essential in the development of human technology during the last twenty thousand years.
All the other living beings can use only a limited range of materials, consisting of polymers that can be synthesized at ambient temperature and pressure (e.g. wood or horn or chitin), adhesives and the equivalent of sedimentary rocks (in various kinds of skeletons, most commonly made from composites of proteins or chitin with insoluble salts of calcium, strontium or barium, but also including those made of sedimentary glass, i.e. opal, like in sponges and diatoms). (Natural glass is either volcanic, made by rapid cooling, like most artificial glass, or sedimentary, i.e. opal deposited from a solution of silicic acid in water. Living beings can catalyze the latter reaction in order to make siliceous skeletons.)
So the myth of Prometheus was actually quite wise in comparison with many later attempts to define essential features of humans.
Any living beings that have remained confined to a water environment, like cephalopods, do not have any chance to develop a technology comparable to that of humans, because without being able to use fire they could not make metals and the other materials required for that. Being unable to create an advanced technology is not an obstacle to reaching a high intelligence, as high as that of humans. The humans of fifty thousand years ago were as intelligent as those of today (perhaps on average even more, as all the dumb ones died quickly), even if they did not have yet any technologies that could not have been developed by something like an octopus.
There’s a ridiculous number of stars in the sky - no matter how low you put the odds of intelligent life, you will still end up with more than 1 civilized species in the universe.
This is, at least for me, the primary utility of such extrapolations. And eventually - extrapolations will be tested.
