[wildermuthn]

Good explanation, but I disagree about the improbability of being “first”. Probability doesn’t apply when taking about why we are conscious at this moment in time. The same applies to the why I experiencing consciousness as a 21st century human verses a 50,000 BC human. Unless we propose that there is a unique pre-existing soul that gets assigned to a single human body out of every single human who will ever exist, consciousness is just a non-individualized phenomenon of the brain and has a 100% chance of existing for every human who will ever exist.

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.