What If Humanity Is Among The First Spacefaring Civilizations?

It would be both very cool and very daunting if it turned out that we were the forerunner race in the galaxy/universe

This is really helpful to sci fi writers. I remember a book Roger Zelazney wrote that had humans spreading all over the galaxy. After a long time they were searching for our original planet hidden in ancient mythology. Our protagonist suspected it was on this old planet called dirt.

People seem to be generally obsessed with the idea that we are some “infantile” civilization with primitive abilities. I think we are at least decently advanced as far as civilizations go. Keep in mind it’s entirely possible that there are thousands of civilizations if not more that haven’t even explored their entire planet, and only live on a few continents. (Oceans of course are another matter).

I think this is a case where it's helpful to apply Occam's Razor. Sure, there might be a bunch of grabby aliens rushing to colonize the rest of the universe, but that involves a lot more assumptions than "we're early". The same logic we use to assume we're fairly typical in the cosmos could just as easily be used by the very first civilization to appear, and they'd have no way of knowing how wrong they are.

Its crazy to think that at some distant point in the future humans could be an elder race in the galaxy

If humanity would actually be the first intelligent civilization in our galaxy or even the universe, we would be studied if they found out in the future - which is also pretty cool.

What makes this debate interesting is the idea that there are other civilizations that have become space-faring at this EXACT point in time, but because of time relativity we would not know for a LOOOONG time

People seem to always leave out the pretty obvious issue that there are so many potential hazards for a planet that while life supporting planets may be very common, going 5 billion consecutive years being habitable enough not to reset everything may be very rare and make Earth quite special (lucky).

I love imagining scenarios where we’re that “wise” ancient race that everyone looks at as basically gods, like the Asgard from Stargate or the Vorlons from Babylon 5 or something. It’s much more fun to think about than seeing ourselves as the emerging “protagonist” race that has no clue what anything is in the universe.

Being early is definitely preferable to the alternative. Since we have no way of knowing how aggressive other intelligent species may be, being early gives us time to gain a technological advantage to allow us to defend ourselves if need-be.

"we can't see ANY aliens" "they must be coming for us, just REALLY fast"

I'd MUCH rather us being early to a party than late. Us finding early civilizations elsewhere is much more comforting thought than advanced aliens finding us. One gives us control, the other leaves us helpless. If we are the "young brothers", we might get a boost for our development but a much more likely scenario would be indifference or outright predatory behavior towards us. Maybe our fate is to simply become eaten by some other intelligent life and be a tiny asterisk in history of intelligent life - just food for others.

We often think about aliens landing on Earth. Imagine being an alien and exploring a planet with intelligent life.

I always wondered about two factors that rarely get mentioned - our freakishly large moon and how it was formed (giving us a significantly larger than normal iron core, possibly spinning faster than normal, to give us a stronger magnetic field, plus the freakishly larger moon acting as both a gyroscope to reduce wobble, create large waves and act as an asteroid shield/deflector) and the possibility of intelligent life evolving too quickly and not have fossil fuels available to power industrialization, and thus limit their technological progress.

then we would become helldivers

The fact that we evolved to our current levels within this tiny window of time is already a profound against-the-odds miracle, I see no reason to believe another species not only was able to evolve in the same amount of time as we, but has surpassed us to interstellar travel.

I've thought this for a long time, and I LOVE to use this analogy, What if we are "The Ancients"(Stargate)? What if it is us that will be leaving clues behind for descendants to find in 5 million years? It's amazing to think about what Our "Galactic Place/Purpose" might turn out to truly be.

You should do a historical spin off series of past discoveries, what they got wrong, what they discovered and how it is used today.

I love you guys. I grew up watching PBS in the early 2000's and seeing that you guys are still putting out absolutely spectacular content is awesome.

I like to think that probably we´re one of the first civilizations to be formed in the universe and that the best objective possible for our race, our legacy, is to spread the seeds of life across the universe so that one day, it´ll be full of life...