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Absolutely. The point I was making there is that imagine there was another perfect clone of our solar system that was identical in every single way and its timeline was 99.995% identical to ours. Intuitively you'd think that they'd probably be at, more or less, the same point in their development. But that 0.005% is the difference between between glorified monkeys and widespread civilizations launching objects and people into space. And if we add another 0.005% to where we are now, everything we know leads us to believe that the change will be even more extreme since our current technological trajectory remains on a very sharp exponential curve upwards with no reason to expect it to end. As an aside these numbers are also based on the age of the Earth. Looking at the age of the universe would probably be more reasonable and would lead to even more extreme results.


Hm, fair enough. We just don't know a great many things. :)




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