| In the context of the Fermi Paradox, that's not really an issue. Let me explain. Imagine the chance of a civilization getting from our point to a Dyson Swarm without destroying themselves is 1% for wahtever reasons you like. If there are 10,000 equivalents to us within 10,000 light years it becomes incredibly likely we won't see one of these. You can argue we're "first" but being "first" out of 100 or 10,000 civilizations gets unlikely. Now imagine there are 5 instead of 10,000. Then not seeing any gets much more likely. So my point is that not seeing any evidence of these so far is still evidence of something and that something is most likely to be that civilizations reaching even our point is rare. As for destruction of a species at our point, that's a whole separeate avenue of discussion. But the short version is that this is incredibly likely. Even if all the superviruses get released and all the nuclear weapons get detonated humanity will still likely survive. A lot of our advances were delayed not because that advance is hard but because we didn't know any better and just coming up with that idea is the problem. Once you know the structure of matter and ideas like smelting steel (which is realtively low tech) can be recovered way quicker than they're lost. 1,000 years ago we were throwing spears at each other. A little over 100 years ago we took our first flight. In the last 50+ years we've gone from landing on the Moon to reducing LEO payload costs from $50,000+/kg to arguably <$1,000/kg and it's likely in the next 20 years that'll come down to possibly as low as $100/kg. Barring some cosmic catastrophe it seems that permanent habitation of orbitals within the next 1,000 is pretty conservative. |
When you look at it this way, the idea of being “first” is actually the most simple solution to the Fermi paradox. It fits with what we see (or rather don’t see) without denying what history shows us: life seems to have sprung up quite easily on earth and by its nature is driven toward intelligence, insofar as intelligence is at root the capacity to predict and control the world around us. Non-intelligence can flourish as long as conditions in its world don’t diverge from the survival patterns encoded into biology. Only intelligence is capable of adapting to new and changing circumstances. Ironically, the harder it is for life to avoid annihilation, the more that evolution needs to select for intelligence. The same is true even for self-annihilation: we will have to be smarter to avoid it, not dumber.
Additionally, why would we expect earth to have evolved intelligent life if another intelligent species spread and settled across the galaxy?
The first ought to be the last.