Seriously, though, I do have some observations on this. To the extent of being a science geek, my favorite subjects are the possibility that we are ALONE in the universe, and anything about the ice ages. To explain how we might be alone, we have had a number of scientist already explore this.
First of all, we have Astronomer Frank Drake, who came up with the famous Drake Equation in 1961:
Drake was trying to come up with a solution to the famous Fermi Paradox, which basically is, "If there's intelligent life out there, then where are they?".
Some observers believe Drake's Equation is still compatible with observations due to the anthropic principle: No matter how low the probability that any given galaxy will have intelligent life, the galaxy that we are in must have at least one intelligent species by definition. There could be hundreds of galaxies in our galactic cluster with no intelligent life whatsoever, but of course we would not be present in those galaxies to observe this fact.
Enrico Fermi assumed the existence of only one extraterrestrial civilization capable of intersidereal travel (at a speed lower than the speed of light). He assumed that this civilization would be interested in the conquest of the Galaxy and that it progressed by jumps, colonizing a planet during a few hundred or thousands years, then sending tens of vessels towards new conquests. The problem is that after only a few million years, the whole of the Galaxy is under the influence of this extraterrestrial civilization (the low rate of travel being largely compensated by the exponential increase of the vessels number).
Simulations of an expansion show that it is possible for one civilization to colonize the whole galaxy in about 10 million years, a short time compared to the age of the Galaxy (ten billion years). The question then arising, and famously formulated by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950: since only one extraterrestrial civilization could spread in a relatively short time, how is it possible that that we never saw the extraterrestrial ones and that our radio telescopes never collected signals of suspect origin?
Arg.... Did not mean to click Post.
So, continuing on:
In other words, Fermi was asking, “So where are they?” The Sun/Earth system is about 4 billion years old. Any space farers should have been here long ago. Some speculate that they were, and left some garbage behind, and life on Earth came from some microbes in the garbage!
I’m not buying it, but it would be a great story.
The biggest issue to me is the age of the Universe, and how the various elements were created. Assuming the Big Bang occurred, we have evidence of it. One indicator is the red Doppler effect discovered by Edward Hubble in the 1950s. This shows that everything in the universe is moving AWAY from us, that is, the universe is expanding. How long has this been going on?
At the far distant reaches of space, the farthest we can see—using radio telescopes—is the cosmic microwave background, which is 13.9 billion years old. This was discovered in 1965.
After the Big Bang, there were no elements except hydrogen. No stars, no light, just a thick soupy fog of hydrogen at thousands of degrees. Eventually, the hydrogen in this soup gathered together in big clumps through gravity, and after about 200 million years, enough hydrogen was lumped together to form the first stars. Let there be light!
A star is just a mass of hydrogen atoms so dense that the are fused into another element; helium. This process is known as fusion. So that is what initially occurred through the first few generations of stars. We had a universe that started with one and only one element, but now we had two elements.
How long did it take to form the other, higher elements?
I think billions of years. Only a supernova can bring forth the massive pressures to fuse hydrogen into the heavier elements: Oxygen, Iron, Carbon, Silicon, Nitrogen, Gold, etc,, etc.
To have enough of these elements in the universe to actually form a rocky planet must have taken many billions of years. It could have taken almost 8 or 9 billion years, up to the point of the formation of the Sun Earth system. And even here, it took another billion years for life to evolve.
Then (and no offense to Biblical Christians) to even get multicellular life took another 2 and half billion years, and finally, from the first worms and trilobites, through the fishes, amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs, mammals, monkeys, apes and us; intelligent life here, in what the past 100,000 years?
These are all well documented as part of our learning. I do not mean belief—faith is something that cannot be proven to be or not to be. I’m not making a Darwinist versus Creationist argument here; just going with the science of life in the universe and how it could be out there...
so it is possible that we are the first. Perhaps it will actually be us who Fermi described as the one extraterrestrial civilization capable of intersidereal travel!!!