I think there’s a chance we might have some form of descendants around in 3 billion years, but if so, they would be unrecognizable to us now. Given that the galaxy is not already someone else’s suburb, I doubt we would ever attain galactic sprawl; too few people would ever want to move beyond significant speed-of-light lag from the rest of civilization. Being mere light-hours away would be the boondocks and meditation retreats of a solar system.
My own theory is that there are civilizations all over the place, but we can’t tell they’re present. Any mature civilization will have used up all of their electromagnetic communications bandwidth at maximal efficiency, and maximally compressed information is indistinguishable from noise. While our radio and television signals radiating across the universe are currently intelligible, that’s just because of our crude technology; less than 200 years from the development of radio, we’ll look like just another stellar noise source.
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I think there’s a chance we might have some form of descendants around in 3 billion years, but if so, they would be unrecognizable to us now. Given that the galaxy is not already someone else’s suburb, I doubt we would ever attain galactic sprawl; too few people would ever want to move beyond significant speed-of-light lag from the rest of civilization. Being mere light-hours away would be the boondocks and meditation retreats of a solar system.
My own theory is that there are civilizations all over the place, but we can’t tell they’re present. Any mature civilization will have used up all of their electromagnetic communications bandwidth at maximal efficiency, and maximally compressed information is indistinguishable from noise. While our radio and television signals radiating across the universe are currently intelligible, that’s just because of our crude technology; less than 200 years from the development of radio, we’ll look like just another stellar noise source.