Thank you for digging that up! It makes a lot of sense, Nick is a wise man. I still feel like it's incredibly hard to quantify just how much a difference a discovery like this (if it indeed turns out to be microbial life) would make.
It took evolution on earth four billion years to result in a single civilization-capable species. The potential of filters along the way seem incomprehensible. And four billion years is a meaningful timespan even in astronomical terms.
And the intelligence part is also like an elephant in the room. Even given vertebrate creatures with nervous systems, we've had those for hundreds of millions of years. The secret sauce for advanced civilization is still only possessed by a single species, and not even it understands how it happened. How do you map a transition like that on a linear timeline of filters?
It took evolution on earth four billion years to result in a single civilization-capable species. The potential of filters along the way seem incomprehensible. And four billion years is a meaningful timespan even in astronomical terms.
And the intelligence part is also like an elephant in the room. Even given vertebrate creatures with nervous systems, we've had those for hundreds of millions of years. The secret sauce for advanced civilization is still only possessed by a single species, and not even it understands how it happened. How do you map a transition like that on a linear timeline of filters?