It is surprising. I suspect there are many millions of planets in our galaxy where intelligent life evolved and even invented radio, and I suspect that all but one or two of those civilizations ended disaster within about 100 years. It seems to be quite a challenge for a technological civilization to survive its own side-effects.
> I suspect that all but one or two of those civilizations ended disaster within about 100 years
All sorts of biological / ecological factors would come into play like average lifespan, the size of life in relation to the size of the planet, resource scarcity, reproduction rates, mobility, avg. number of offspring, mutation rates, weather patterns, geography, etc.
Then you get into social and technological factors.
We have a sample size of 1, so it’s hard to extrapolate or understand where we are on the probability curve.
The best data point we might have for a self-inflicted civilization ending event would be looking at it from a smaller point view. How many times in history has one group attacked another such that both groups ceased to exist?
One positive sign is that even with all our destruction and violence, someone usually wins or backs down with the ability to continue on living.
Of course there are always long-tail events like mutually assured destruction, but I don’t know if 100 years is the correct timetable for ~100% certainty.
There was an interesting HN discussion about it a few weeks ago here with folks chiming in on the best ways to assess the odds of a long-tail event like MAD:
The Fermi Paradox might be on an earlier stage of evolution. Perhaps it's easier that we thought to evolve intelligence from our common ancestor, but going from inert chemistry floating in space to that common ancestor is astronomically rare.
There's the data point that life here on Earth began as soon as it could when the planet cooled off. So it suggests life itself might not be that rare.
That could also mean life has to get started early or it won’t at all. If that’s the case then the only observation would be that life gets started early.
> That could also mean life has to get started early or it won’t at all.
How would that work? It seems to me the only that matters is that the proper conditions for abiogenesis be maintained for whatever duration it requires. It shouldn't matter how far along the Universe or planet history this period occurs
If life gets started in the violent conditions of primordial ocean in contact with primordial crust then there could be any number of factors that change that drastically lower the probability of abiogenesis happening. Like a change in the chemical makeup of the primordial ocean or crust or both. It could be the depletion or accumulation of any number of chemicals that interfere with or are needed for abiogenesis. My money would be on self catalytic reactions that use up the ingredients for abiogenesis being common in environments suitable for abiogenesis. Life could be rare because when you strike a match you should expect fire not some slow burning reaction that persistently stores information in a way that learns and if you get the fire you don’t get the life because they burn the same materials. If that is the case then life would need to be extremely lucky to exist long enough to evolve to the point where it has diversified its energy and material inputs past the point where it would be stopped in its tracks by simpler competing reactions that are closer to fire than life. I like this possibility more than simple environmental change because it makes the Ferny paradox far weirder of a calculation. Water worlds in the habitable zone for example would end up being mysteriously devoid of life since they would be perfect for non life reactions to take over where as planets with many isolated environments like lakes and tide pools could have a higher chance of recycled chemicals broken down not immediately being contaminated.
