I do not know why the heavens look empty but I think it's extremely unlikely that they are. Andromeda e.g. is only 2.5M light years away; that's nothing on an evolutionary timescale. There are too many planets for us to be the first to get this far. I think about this all time.
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Replying to @willdoingthings
Even if we're not the first, it's certain that some species at some point was the first, and one of them would have the exact same chain of thought you have now
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Replying to @vandeRede @willdoingthings
What I'm trying to say is that ultimately these discussions come down to Anthropics, which is cursed
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Replying to @vandeRede
I feel like "anthropics" has precisely as much explanatory power as "coincidence"; it's a last resort, and yeah insofar as it's metaphysical, twenty years of pondering it hasn't satisfied me
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Replying to @willdoingthings @vandeRede
But I feel like a more Copernican answer is likely and we just don't know it yet. If it's physically unlikely on its face but I still want a physical explanation. It would be very frightening to find that we are in one of countless simulations of the original planet
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Replying to @willdoingthings @vandeRede
i think we're too close to the beginning of the stelliferous era for a truly copernican answer to make sense. not sure though
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wikipedia timeline of future superficially confirms but not sure i've taken everything relevant into account
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otoh what hypotheses do predict that we would be near a very early but not extremely early star?
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"we're the first" predicts this but only for a pretty limited parameter range i think
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i think most of the parameter range predicts either very beginning of stelliferous or (like zoo hypothesis) predicts random moment within it
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p4 of https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/44bd/2a319ef7acd1c1d8e2d59c146efb58e2dd7c.pdf … is relevant, trying to find better sources
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