Earlier quoted context omitted.
Based on the developments in exo-planet research along with discoveries like this over the past couple of years, I would conjecture that life is ridiculously common. But by life, I mean microbial life. I would imagine that multi-cellular life is much rarer, and life capable of reaching human-level intelligence and beyond is probably absurdly rare, on the level of something like one species per galaxy. It's all worthl…
I'm kinda curious if there's any evidence that would support or rule out intelligent life having existed on earth before. I mean, if humanity goes extinct and it's another 65 million years before another intelligent species evolves, what evidence would they have of our existence? All our buildings would've long since crumbled into dust or been crushed by plate tectonics. Metal will corrode and rust away after a few t…
If we make it for another few hundred years, not only will there be a mass extinction, but there will also probably be a traceable sudden explosion in a novel form of gene transfer and creation that can't be explained by any other theory. The modern fashionable self-loathing idea that we are a uniquely biodiversity-destroying organism may be merely a consequence of our current point of view; rather than "extinction" this could in fact be an inexplicable explosion in diversity if you could see 1000 years into the future. But of course the mass extinction will still be there. I haven't done an analysis but it may also be the case that the extinction has a very characteristic pattern; again, rather than the fashionable self-loathing model of "humans just destroy everything" it may be noticeable that fauna died out in favor of things that are clearly domesticated even just from their skeletons, and that human predators were preferentially extincted, etc.