Well, I’m not sure you’ve considered the time-frames involved in that concern. We have a whole lot of time before the sun goes out on us. It took Earth about 2 billion years to develop multicellular life. It then took another 2.5 b before we got vertebrates. That was the hard part though and it’s done, I don’t think there’s any undoing it. There aren’t many things that could wipe out all forms of vertebrates on earth, so I’m confident that would be as far back as the planet could reasonably be set back by any disaster.
Just 60 million years ago, mammals were not at all a dominant form of life, yet that’s all it took for early rodent-like mammals to evolve into human beings (as well as all the other mammals we know today). So based on that timeline, if all human life on the planet were wiped out tomorrow, I’d estimate (pessimistically) it would take less than another 200 million years before another species gained a similar level of intelligence and began a new era of civilization (and perhaps as little as 10 m years, as some species are already quite intelligent). In fact, if the next species screws up, and gets themselves killed, I expect earth will get another go at it in another 10–200 million years, over and over again.
On the other side of the equation, the sun will expand into a red giant and consume the earth in about 5 billion years. That gives us a whole lot of tries to get it right.
I have, but I’m also concerned that humanity got “lucky” so far and that this won’t happen again. There are theories positing that there are several blocking “gates” to civilization, and humanity passed an exceptional number of them already.
It’s reasonable to assert that’s a misleading, human centric perspective; but I’d also point out that the Fermi Paradox supports it. Either:
The conditions that gave birth to our civilization are not exceptional, and spread intelligent life is hiding from us (unlikely at this point, I think)
They are exceptional, and we just happened to have passed many unlikely hurdles so far (hence it is critical we don’t trip up at the end here).
They are not that exceptional (eg more intelligent vertebrates will rise, and would rise on other planets), but there is some gate we are not aware of yet (which I have heard called the Great Filter).
Another suspicious coincidence I’d point out is that we are, seemingly, the only advanced civilization from Earth so far. If we died out soon, other vertebrates that rise would find evidence of us by this point, wouldn’t they? Hence odds are we wouldnt be the first and we would have found precursors if ‘vertebrates rising and then killing themselves off’ was a likely scenario.
TL;DR: I suspect vertebrates -> our tech level is a difficult jump.
Well, I’m not sure you’ve considered the time-frames involved in that concern. We have a whole lot of time before the sun goes out on us. It took Earth about 2 billion years to develop multicellular life. It then took another 2.5 b before we got vertebrates. That was the hard part though and it’s done, I don’t think there’s any undoing it. There aren’t many things that could wipe out all forms of vertebrates on earth, so I’m confident that would be as far back as the planet could reasonably be set back by any disaster.
Just 60 million years ago, mammals were not at all a dominant form of life, yet that’s all it took for early rodent-like mammals to evolve into human beings (as well as all the other mammals we know today). So based on that timeline, if all human life on the planet were wiped out tomorrow, I’d estimate (pessimistically) it would take less than another 200 million years before another species gained a similar level of intelligence and began a new era of civilization (and perhaps as little as 10 m years, as some species are already quite intelligent). In fact, if the next species screws up, and gets themselves killed, I expect earth will get another go at it in another 10–200 million years, over and over again.
On the other side of the equation, the sun will expand into a red giant and consume the earth in about 5 billion years. That gives us a whole lot of tries to get it right.
I have, but I’m also concerned that humanity got “lucky” so far and that this won’t happen again. There are theories positing that there are several blocking “gates” to civilization, and humanity passed an exceptional number of them already.
It’s reasonable to assert that’s a misleading, human centric perspective; but I’d also point out that the Fermi Paradox supports it. Either:
The conditions that gave birth to our civilization are not exceptional, and spread intelligent life is hiding from us (unlikely at this point, I think)
They are exceptional, and we just happened to have passed many unlikely hurdles so far (hence it is critical we don’t trip up at the end here).
They are not that exceptional (eg more intelligent vertebrates will rise, and would rise on other planets), but there is some gate we are not aware of yet (which I have heard called the Great Filter).
Another suspicious coincidence I’d point out is that we are, seemingly, the only advanced civilization from Earth so far. If we died out soon, other vertebrates that rise would find evidence of us by this point, wouldn’t they? Hence odds are we wouldnt be the first and we would have found precursors if ‘vertebrates rising and then killing themselves off’ was a likely scenario.
TL;DR: I suspect vertebrates -> our tech level is a difficult jump.