So... Considering there is life out somewhere in the universe, would they be behind or ahead in time? Or will we never know?
As the universe is constantly expanding, it means that we're moving further away from other galaxies right? What's your intake on that Sir J?
Well, like Shattered said, they could be ahead or behind us in technology. What really matters is that, how long an intelligent civilisation is able to survive before wiping itself out. The universe can be filled with intelligent life, but they might wipe themselves out as soon as they are able to. We don't know how many of these civilisations even last long enough to acquire the kind of technology we have. We only have to look at ourselves, we've only had electricity for a few centuries and we've come a long way since. It's easier to wipe our species out today than ever before. The more advanced a civilisation gets, the more likely and capable it is to wipe itself out.
The universe might be filled with intelligent civilisations, but they might wipe themselves out before they become as technologically advanced as us or before that. When it does become technologically apt, it presents a very limited time period for us to find it. It can be 100 years or 10,000 years, on cosmological time scales, that's a blink of an eye. That's what I think about that.
For now, our telescopes aren't sensitive enough to look for such civilisations in other galaxies. We can't say anything about that until we have telescopes which are looking for life in other galaxies. Until then, we won't be able to answer that question.
Almost all of the galaxies are moving away from us. For now, it doesn't really matter for our search of Earth 2.0. We're primarily looking for life in our own galaxy. We are not capable of looking for planets in other galaxies at the moment. We have ~200 billion stars in our own galaxy to check out first. But we do have
evidence to suggest that other galaxies possess stars which have planets, too.
If life evovled on the said planet before it did on earth then they'll probably be ahead of us if intelggence arose later than we evoloed into intelgent beings then its quite possiable that we are ahead of them. Though if life had rose there after it arose here and for some reason they might have evovled intelgence quicker then we did (forgive me if i am wrong but Evolutionariy bio is not my subject) then yes the could be smarter then us and could have been "born" after us
There's no evidence to suggest that natural selection favours higher intelligence. A chicken is capable of surviving perfectly fine with the intelligence it has. Even if life arose on a planet before Earth, we don't know how long it would take for intelligence life to sprout up. On Earth, it took 4 billion years.
Lets say our pictures reaches nearest earth like planet with light. Right now they would only be able to see pictures of dinosaurs.
Muddy, it depends on where the nearest Earth-like planet may reside. We're looking for planets in our own galaxy. Which is a 100,000 light years across, the closest Earth-like planet I can think of is Gliese 581g, a rocky planet orbiting in the habitable zone of its star, and it's only 20 light years away. Any intelligent life there will be seeing the 1990s at the moment.
Any planet in the Milky Way won't be seeing the beginning of the Palaeocene period for that you'd have to be somewhere on NGC 406 (pictured below), which is 65 million light years away.
Topic: We are not alone most likely