We still have this problem of what DNA was doing for that approximately two and a half billion years,

the over one majority of the history of life on earth. Why didn't it evolve at all during that time?

What's going on? There's a wonderful book called Rare Earth by Warden Brownlee,

and these guys talk about all the weird quirky things that happened in the evolutionary history of Earth.

I just picked on the fact that we, Universal Explaners, evolved seemingly fortuitously,

seemingly once, but you can go back and realize that evolving from single-cell bacteria to a

multicellular organism was weird and unusual and hasn't been able to re-repeat it in the laboratory

setting, and then to go from the multicellular organism to something that's like a plant,

and then something that's like an animal. Each of these things seems to have occurred

for chance reasons that we don't understand. I think there could be a combination of things going on.

Your argument can be statistical rather than absolute. We may not be alone in the universe,

but to become a universe of explainers might be so rare that when you start multiplying that by

interstellar distances, which are quite vast, and I think Fermi also had the unreasonable assumption

that interstellar aliens would figure out how to get past the speed of light. When we have no

hypothesis whatsoever as to how that might be possible, we have nothing even vaguely in the category

of how to get past the speed of light. If you're limited by the speed of light, and if the jump to

universal explainers is rare, then we might just be too far apart, and it might just take a lot

longer. The universe is very big, but it's also, at least as far as planets and stars are concerned,

almost entirely empty. Given that, it's still quite reasonable to say that, yeah, humans and

human-like explainers are quite rare. We're still early in their formation across the universe,

and they're just spread out by such incredibly vast distances that we haven't encountered each other.

And if we did encounter each other, I think we'd know. For example, by the time an alien spacecraft

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