David Kipping

Most stars do not have an Earth-like planet.

It's like a level of maybe 1%, 2% at best.

And yet, here we have the Earth.

It not only is an Earth-like planet, has the right conditions for life, it has life on it.

So an alien could use their sun-sized telescope to figure that out.

They would know we were here.

They would know not only we're here, but that there is complex life on this planet.

So for three and a half, three billion years, there was just simple life, just single-celled life on this planet.

Multicellular life is a recent thing.

So presumably that's rare, right?

If most of the time it's single-celled, most of the planets out there, presumably even if they have life on them, are in that state.

And then further, there's us here, right?

And we're going through this transitional point as a human society.

So you think if you're an anthropologist, this would be like an incredibly fascinating world to study.

I think there's almost like a tourism paradox.

How come Earth is the perfect place to visit?

And yet we don't see any super obvious signs.

Some people feel differently about that.

But certainly astronomers, we don't see in our telescope data spaceships flying around through our field of view.

Yeah, if you want to do a proper anthropology experiment, you don't want to interfere with the experiment.