08-25-2014, 10:36 PM
Acer wrote:
Considering it's taken 4 billion years to get one civilization, the odds of a second arising before the sun makes this place inhabitable are pretty slim. However, if I had to pick, assuming neanderthals and primates are also off the table just to make it tougher, I'd say crows.
The 4 billion year number gets bandied about a lot when questions like this come up, but it is very misleading. The early earth had no life or environments supportive of life so is irrelevant. It is not until around 600 million years ago that complex life existed on earth, and it was probably not until a couple of hundred million years ago that central nervous systems of any complexity arose. Now we have millions of species with complex nervous systems and brains that could potentially evolve into civilization creating species in just a couple of million years, the same time frame that we evolved from primitive chimp-like creatures into creatures capable of destroying our entire habitat.