Maybe the Aliens Are Addicted To Computer Games 496
Hugh Pickens writes "Geoffrey Miller has an interesting hypothesis in Seed Magazine that explains Fermi's Paradox — why 40 years of intensive searching for extraterrestrial intelligence have yielded nothing: no radio signals, no credible spacecraft sightings, no close encounters of any kind. All the aliens are busy playing computer games. The aliens 'forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism,' writes Miller. He says the fundamental problem is that an evolved mind must pay attention to indirect cues of biological fitness, rather than tracking fitness itself, and that although evolution favors brains that tend to maximize fitness (as measured by numbers of great-grandkids), no brain has capacity enough to do so under every possible circumstance. 'The result is that we don't seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that have tended to promote survival, and luscious mates who have tended to produce bright, healthy babies. The modern result? Fast food and pornography,' writes Miller. 'Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot.' Miller adds that most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time and resources to their pleasures, and less to their children, until they eventually die out."
Who here doesn't think a TNG-style Holodeck would lead to the downfall of our civilization?
I hope it is a humorous article (Score:3, Interesting)
All it takes is one individual who is not busy playing games otherwise.
Also, the article is dated May 1st, 2006. Is seed magazine run by the same guys running /.?
Decision point may be now (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe so. It might seem unlikely an advanced race would be so dumb.
Perhaps industrial infrastructure will be focused on digitized minds in a virtual landscape, and will not be "wasted" on supporting organic bodies and fixing them over the centuries. Maybe digital life is going to be much richer and more expanded than what can fit inside an organic brain.
On the other hand, we've had the public Internet for 15 years, say they've had it for 15,000 years.
It's hard to understand what their issues will be.
However one possible link is that there may be a point of decision near the beginning of Internet development for all societies, which characterizes all history after that.
Not to be tongue in cheek, but it could be summarized as DRM/MAFIAA/ACTA/ANTI-TERROR/WTF vs. OpenSource/Level Playing Field/Honesty&Balance. As time progresses, the DRM..WTF government-industrial players control the lifeblood of the society, whether it is controlling software/entertainment or perhaps with more advanced technology, controlling a person's biological makeup, or perhaps your life as a simulated person in a planet-wide computer.
The organics will (as some recent novels have suggested) be on the outside of mainstream society and will have only the OpenSource technologies and resources available to them. They probably do not have extra resources lying around enough to waste on contacting other civilizations, especially if their communications are considered equivalent to caveman grunts by most all of the listeners.
Virtual realities and human needs (Score:3, Interesting)
There are several SF stories around Utopias/Distopias where most humans spend all their time immersed in some kind of ultra realistic VR environment, typically linked via some kind of direct brain feed. Basically a realistic enough VR environment, thanks to our ability do immerse in it and forget that it's not real, can fulfill all the psychological needs of an individual, more so even than reality since it has fewer barriers and does not suffer from the limitations of normal societal structures (in human society there are only a limited number of positions of a given type, for example Village Chief, but in a VR environment you can use NPCs to create as many virtual societies as you want and as such as many slots of a given type as you want).
There are quite a number of natural limitations to a scenario where all mankind lives in VR:
- Natural selection would remove from the genetic pool those that spent all their time in VR, since they wouldn't reproduce.
- Physical needs would still have to be catered for. This means that things still have to be produced (like food). The VR environments, being targetted at satisfying the individual would be highly unproductive, so full automated means of production would have to exist, and they would need to be fully fed from some for of free energy.
- As long as there are multiple nations, unless ALL of them "went into VR" at the same time, the ones that didn't would simply march their armies into the land of ones that did and take over.
That said, for exploration of the unknow to stop or slow significantly, all that it takes is for the Explorer types amongst us - the same kind of people that 3 or 4 centuries ago would be jumping into boats and travelling to unexplored lands, and the same kind that nowadays would drive us to explorer space - to fulfill their drive to explore in VR environments which one miht argue already happens in part. It's thus quite possible that this will keep Human Society in the period of stagnation with regards to expanding our physical borders of knowledge in which it currently is. In the extreme, having lost all our drive to physically go out and explore, humans could turn their backs to space forever.
That such a scenario could occur in alien societies is not beyond the realm of possibility. However, there are other drivers for exploration (conquest, material wealth, overcrowding, maybe even religious reasons) and the idea that all alien societies will sooner or later fall to the trap of "satiation of the need to explore by VR environments" is far fetched.
Then again one might also argue that the causal relation is actually the reverse:
- Human Society being in a period of stagnation with regards to expanding our physical borders of knowledge is not caused by Explorer types finding saciety in VR environments but instead said Explorer types are driven to "find their fix" in VR environments because we are currently not expanding our physical borders of knowledge.
Brilliance (Score:3, Interesting)
My favourite line from an excellent old physics book called "From the Black Hole to the Infinite Universe".
"Yes, there are aliens but they don't want to talk to us. Have you tried communicating with ants lately?"
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Hole-Infinite-Universe/dp/0816233233 [amazon.com]
> They don't need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today.
Damned brilliant article. Scary when you laugh at the funny man in the picture and then you realize it's you.
(LOL. I can't wait to update my Facebook about this!)
Re:Or maybe on the contrary, let's (Score:5, Interesting)
The speed of light is only theoretically the speed limit, an absolute upper bound. In practice, nothing with enough mass and complexity to be alive, much less intelligent, can travel at anywhere near c and hope to survive. Interstellar travel is wildly impractical. It makes for interesting fiction, but unless our understanding of physics is TOTALLY messed up (*way* more flawed than we currently think pure Newtonian physics was), there's absolutely zero practical application, ever.
Even interstellar *communication* is wildly impractical. I mean, come on, latency measured in *years*? What kind of conversation could you have, EVEN if you already spoke the same language? And if you don't, how are you going to learn it? Cultural immersion is NOT possible. Back-and-forth dialog isn't even really possible. With no pre-existing linguistic information to help you bridge the gap, *and* no interaction, how would you characterize an alien language? You could spend centuries analyzing a single hour's worth of message and get nowhere. It'd be like trying to read the Voynich manuscript, only much worse (because the Voynich manuscript was written by a *human*, and furthermore by a human who was obviously familiar with a number of popular human writing conventions that we understand; an alien message wouldn't be so comprehensible). You almost certainly wouldn't be able to figure out for sure if the signals you were getting were language and represented actual meaning or not.
If there were any *intelligent* aliens, they would eventually figure this out and give up on the idea.
Could it be... (Score:1, Interesting)
...they are simply ignoring us? You see the problem is our egos are so frickin big that we consider ourselves to a species worthy of connecting with. Take a look around..Take a look at how we treat each other, other species, the planet around us. What makes us think we are such a great species to connect with? If 'they' exist they probably think we are scum. Possibly even in the same way we consider ourselves so much superior than other creatures on this planet. The problem being that we consider our superiority only in terms of ourselves not the universe at large.
Re:Or maybe on the contrary, let's (Score:4, Interesting)
And if c really is the speed limit, and space being that big, maybe nobody is interested in investing now in a ship which would return with the goods in 1000 years.
Or, alternatively:
Terran President: Ok, Alpha Centauri expedition, go to Alpha Centauri, and mine the resources and send 20% of what you get to us because you're our colony.
Alpha Centauri Expedition: Ok!
(15 years later)
ACE: Ok, we arrived at Alpha Centauri, let's start mining now.
ACE: Wait, why do we have to send 20% to them again? It's not like they're doing anything for us.
(30 years later, TP finally finds out what's going on)
TP: Wait, why aren't they doing their colonial duties? Let's send an interstellar war fleet and enforce our will with an iron fist! After all, they're just a puny colony.
ACE: Unfortunately for you, we, with our planet full of fresh unmined resources, have actually grown quite big...
(15 years later, TP and ACE's respective interstellar war fleets reach each other, nuclear war ensues, 4 billion casualties)
Rinse and repeat. Expansion would turn out to be a very slow and painful process if that were to happen.
Re:Idiocracy... (Score:3, Interesting)
Jerry Springer begs to differ. ... and that's just what I could think of in five minutes.
Also: American Idol, Soap Operas, Beauty Contestants wanting world peace, the ENTIRE fashion industry, Hannah Montana, The Spice Girls, Pro-wrestling fans, Hollywood movie stars (ever heard one of them when talking unscripted ? With a few rare exceptions... they sound like they learned English from a user's manual for a Taiwanese VCR translated from Korean by a Japanese toddler), G.W. Busch, Homophobes, $Religion Fundamentalists, Soldiers, Patriots, Censorship-advocates and people who use the phrase "think of the children", MTV, voters, racists, christian scientists, scientologists
Basically... the sad reality is that if thinking I'm smarter than those people makes me an elitist, I'd rather be an elitist than an idiot. Unfortunately, the reality is that everyone of those elitists probably will have more children than me- on account of I figured out how to use condoms and even more than most of the rest of slashdot on account of actually having sex sometimes.
While the smart people are on slashdot watching porn, we're not exactly the highest reproducing members of the gene-pool anymore...
That kinda gives me an idea (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, actually that gives me an idea for a counter-hypothesis about how a first contact would go. I mean, if we're at attributing to aliens carricatures of human stereotypes...
April 5'th, 2063, 11:00 AM: The USS Phoenix, the first warp-capable Earth vessel, launches with Zephram Cochrane aboard.
April 5'th, 2063, 11:30 AM: The USS Phoenx deploys the warp generators and breaks the warp barrier.
April 5'th, 2063, 11:35 AM: The warp surge is detected by the Vulcan ship T'Plana-Hath.
April 5'th, 2063, 11:45 AM: After a brief attempt at hailing it, the Vulcans conclude that the alien craft must contain tentacled aliens intent on raping their women, as documented in the several Hentai transmissions they had intercepted.
April 5'th, 2063, 11:50 AM: The T'Plana-Hath unloads all its fore torpedo tubes into the Phoenix.
April 5'th, 2063, 11:55 AM: The T'Plana-Hath deploys several quarantine beacons beyond Jupiter's orbit to warn other ships to stay away from the newfound menace.
Re:Or maybe on the contrary, let's (Score:1, Interesting)
Look to our own society: in 10000 years, we might have sufficient advanced AI so that humans do not have to work. We would be free to do whatever we like, including escaping in a virtual reality.
Resources are abundant in space. Ores in the astroid belt, hydrocarbons on Titan, helium in Jupiters atmosphere, water in the Oort cloud, etc. There are many times more resources in space than there are on Earth. We don't need to go al the way to another star to find these. All stars probably have planets, Oort clouds, remnants of the protoplanetary disk like the astroids. They may not have to travel to another star for resources. They may look for living space, but not to move large percentages of their populations to.
Economics is likely not a motive for interstellar travel. Science may be, and also getting species of Earth organisms for study or breeding (humans?) or cultivating (they like exotic fruit cocktails?). Or they may want to help start-up civilizations like ours get into the Universal Family or some such.
Even if c is the speed limit, it may be that they live very long, like giant turtles on Earth do, or altered their won biology to live thousands of years. Then sub-light speeds do not matter so much anymore.
Do you think that technology keeps advancing exponentially without bounds, or might there be a ceiling, i.e. at some point all conceivable technology is just _there_, anything is made for you whatever you need? I can imagine a future with technology which is everywhere, only not in a visible or recognizable form.
Re:He must spend too much time on games himself (Score:4, Interesting)
Meh, this is just the same old puritan crap all over again.
He even scored a hat-trick: video games, fast food and pornography.
Now he just needs to tie those back into the internet, or even better Facebook or Twitter (and let's face it, two of the three are easy) and he'll be an overnight tabloid sensation.
Re:Yea (Score:4, Interesting)
While I mostly agree with you, consider the shark and the dolphin. They have followed very different evolutionary paths, but the end result is quite similar. In the end, there are only so many ways of solving the 'propel through the water' problem. Even squids have a broadly similar structure, although they use jets instead of fins for propulsion.
Re:Oh stop (Score:3, Interesting)
The simple act of cutting our meat intake would result a sizable expansion of calories available for human consumption.
You don't even need to do that. We're producing more food than is needed to feed the population, the problem is distribution. You have hippies buying fair trade roses from Kenya, instead of locally produced ones, driving up the cost of food there and causing people to starve because they can't afford imported food. No one starves because there isn't enough food in the world, people only starve because they can't afford to buy food that will be thrown away if it isn't sold.
RTF last 3 paragraphs (Score:2, Interesting)
Looks like almost nobody here read the last 3 paragraphs. Too bad - they appear to be the most interesting.
Even so, I feel Dr. Miller is a bit too extreme in his view - one doesn't need to be a luddite to resist the self-indulgence pitfalls of modern society. Hard drugs such as cocaine an heroine (not to mention alcohol) short-circuit the brain's reward system in a much more brutal and direct way that video games and porn. These have been around for more that 100 years. Did they cause socio-economic problems when first introduced? Sure. Have they led to collapsing societies? Not quite. What we're seeing now is a plague of young people ruining their chance of a good jobs by playing MMORPGs all day. While this causes many personal tragedies, the good jobs still get filled in by those that are not addicted, and society still rumbles on. Same on a bigger scale: there are still people not working in the entertainment industry, there are still people pushing ahead science and technology...
I think in the (not-so-)long term, addictive video games will get a similar status as porn and alcohol: restricted to adults, and over-indulgence would be highly frowned upon. A certain percentage of the population will fall for them, a certain percentage will abstain from them, and the vast majority will suffer mild loss of productivity because of them (and have fun doing so).
Re:Yea (Score:1, Interesting)
That's one of the most ridiculous hypotheses I've ever read. Sure, it is possible, Sure, everything we know about aliens is based on speculations that don't go against our knowledge. But most speculations at least seem plausible and match the only example of an advanced civilization we know of.
And this single example has shown us a few things for which I would be surprised if they don't apply universally. The first is that no matter what the general population are, there would always be deviations and a small percentage of people who are different is enough to affect world-wide matters. The second is that if these different people don't exist or are unable to push the rest of the society like we do, the whole population would probably still be in the caves, because most of our progress depended on them.
Well, the last one seems plausible, though. However, I thought that the possibility that all aliens are still in the caves was already considered, and thus this story brings nothing new to us.
I don't think there's one reason for it all, though.
1. While I want to believe that life is abundant in the universe, complex life as ours might turn out to be rare.
2. For four billion years all life here was essentially living in the caves. We created our civilization in a wink lasting the mere fifty thousand years because homo sapiens somehow managed to look outside of the box by chance. Sure, being intelligent was an evolutionary advantage for the billions of years that the homo genus survived, so we didn't come out of nowhere, but there's still no guarantee that this happens often in the universe. We might be one of the few advanced civilizations.
3. What makes us think we can hear them? Have they developed the radio? Do they use broadcasts? What if they use encryption making the signals indistinguishable from noise? Why would they care to send signals to us? Maybe some of them "know" that there's a little chance that there's someone out there?
Or maybe it just so happened all of us intelligent species from other planets are sending signals out "right now" because the universe is at the right age to allow intelligent life to even develop without getting blasted by cosmic radiation or any of the infinite other catastrophes that could wipe us out. It takes thousands possibly millions of years for a signal to get here from another solar system so its possible that the signals are still in transit. Its ridiculous to work at below light speed in intergalactic communication, so its best just to put it on the back burner. We would be better off spending time trying to see if FTL or wormhole travel/communication is even possible.
(I realize that FTL travel is not possible in the sense of going faster than light in space, but I mean FTL as in worm-hole travel or possibly some other way that hasnt been thought of or discovered yet.)
Re:Not really. (Score:3, Interesting)
Sociological studies of hunter-gatherer societies have indicated that they even now have more free time than we do, not less. Moreover, it was only within the last 400-500 years that agricultural societies began to overtake hunter-gatherers in terms of nutrition (as measured by looking at the height of skeletons, and signs of the presence of malnutrition-related diseases). In other words, it was only very recently that agricultural civilization became good not just for those at the top but also for the majority.
The argument, then, for why agricultural civilization came to dominate the world even if it did not result in a better quality of life is this: Although the diet of cheap carbohydrates provided by agriculture did not result in healthy people, it did provide energy to sustain more people (albeit with a lower quality of life), whereas hunter-gatherer civilizations need to practice contraception and infanticide (and they did, and do, both) to avoid overexploiting their range. The societies with larger populations (the agricultural ones) were, in turn, able to field armies and otherwise exert power in ways that hunter-gatherers were not, and in this way also out-competed them.
In other words, until very recently, if you wanted to create a large and powerful society at the expense of individual health and leisure time, your best bet was to practice agriculture. If you wanted to create a small society of well-nourished and healthy people with more leisure time at the expense of collective power, you'd want to pick the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. And even now, although hunter-gatherers no longer have the nutritional advantage, they still win on leisure time.
Re:OP failed Evolutionary Biology (Score:3, Interesting)
You are overlooking the possibility of games eventually being so good that all humans become addicted. Forget your LCD and joystick; think about direct neural I/O to a VR world that is seems better in every way than the real world--a game designed specifically to match the human brain's desires precisely.
Despite "DIFFERENTIAL REPRODUCTIVE SUCCESS," species have and will continue to go extinct. Humans could go extinct, too. This is just one possible mechanism.
Re:Yea (Score:4, Interesting)
No, we created a civilization because we can transfer information through symbolic language, which in turn allows us to function, in some ways, like a single organism, in the same way as your brain- and other cells work together as you but a lot less tightly bound, due to your internal bandwidth being much greater than external bandwidth.
All pack animals act as a single organism in some sense, but they have a hard time passing learned information between members, so the pack as a whole doesn't learn. With sumbolic language, humans overcame that, allowing concepts of any abstraction level be passed between people. The human pack began to learn, and as it learned it became better at utilizing resources, causing it to grow, which in turn made it smarter. That's why culture really took of after the invention of agriculture: the number of people, and thus their collective brain mass, exploded.
The problem humanity solved was not how to make its members more intelligent, it was how to exceed the practical size and complexity limits of the nervous system a single organism can carry with it. A single human - any human - is nowhere near smart enough to go from a cave to a skyscraper, but humanity as a whole is, especially since it's not burdened with limited lifetime.
All of this raises a question of what happens as technology increases our communication bandwidth - if I can access your thoughts as easily as I can mine, there's no real difference between the two, now is there? And if there's no difference between your thoughts or mine, are we really two different people, or a single one using two bodies? And what happens when you keep adding brains and computers and databanks and whatever?
Re:Yea (Score:4, Interesting)
A factor of 200 really isn't very large. Ion drives and solar sales both have the potential to reach this sort of speed and could be built with small improvements on current technology. 1% of C only requires you to accelerate at 1g for 3.5 days, or for about a month at 0.1g. If you can sustain 0.01g for long periods (which ion drives should soon be able to do) the it will take you a year to get up to 0.1C, but that's not a huge amount of time in comparison to the time it takes to travel from one star to another at that speed.
Even a short trip will be a few centuries, so one year for accelerating and one for braking isn't really relevant, especially if you can use solar energy at both ends and only carry a small amount of propellant that you accelerate to very high speeds. Special relativity actually helps with reaction drives, if you can accelerate the propellant to a nontrivial fraction of the speed of light (ion drives work on the same general principle as particle accelerators, so this is not entirely unreasonable).
Of course, I said technologically feasible, not economically feasible. A craft capable of crossing interstellar distances and doing something useful on arrival could probably be built today, but it would take the entire output of several industrial nations with no hope of any payback. By the time it arrived, it would be obsolete; even a 1% improvement in acceleration would get a second craft to the destination years earlier.
The craft that you cited are chemical rockets. These have a much lower power to mass ratio than an ion drive. I said in the near future, meaning the next couple of decades, so it's not unreasonable to assume that drives that are currently being prototyped would have made it into general use. They could be in a much shorter time given enough investment, but sending things to other stars isn't really a priority for anyone who could afford to at the moment.
Re:Yea (Score:3, Interesting)
"Bipeds are much slower, tire much easier,"
While the first statement is true, the second is most certainly false. Bipeds actually have a more efficient way of walking(and running) which allows us to run greater distances than quadrupeds.
In fact, some tribes in Africa use this advantage in their huntings methods. They simply run after a prey(I believe they favour fleeing prey to fighting prey) and chase them until the prey tires and then they strike when it is exhausted.
This meager Wikipedia article has some information about this fenomenon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting [wikipedia.org]
Re:Or maybe on the contrary, let's (Score:3, Interesting)
Productivity is measured per man-hour. If we made the same stuff in fewer hours, our productivity would go up.
Based on the people I know who prefer the 9-80 work schedule to the conventional 5-40, I'd guess that quite a lot of people would prefer to have a four-day workweek.
Note, by the way, that your arguments are essentially the same as those that opposed the five-day workweek, back when six days was the norm.
Personally, I don't expect to see a four-day workweek within ten years. I'll be surprised if I don't see one within twnety, though.
Re:Smart people are repulsive (Score:1, Interesting)
To me the legal part is only one small aspect off marriage. There's the commitment you make to each other. Then, there's the commit you make before your friends and family to your marriage. And just as important is the commitment your friends and family make to honor your marriage. Now maybe you two don't have a community, but there's still a lot more to marriage than the legal papers.
I was at a most wonderful wedding recently. It was wonderful to see everyone come together and support a loving union. I don't care one bit if they informed the state about it.
Re:Yea (Score:3, Interesting)
By the same token, an advanced civilization almost certainly is social with a basic code of ethics that we can understand... Utilitarian ethics, like don't steal from others because you wouldn't like it if they stole from you, may be a constant.
I sincerely doubt that. When I was stationed in Thailand in 1974, it was a completely alien environment. The hills were different shapes, the grass was a different color green, the sky was a different color blue, none of the vegetation was the same.
The mores and morals of the Thais were alien as well; I had a .45 pistol pointed at my face because I didn't want to drink a shot of whiskey, because (as I then found out) it's a grave insult to refuse a gift there; more like a sin. OTOH it was a bhuddist country, and one woman was horrified that I would swat a fly; killing any animal, even an insect, is an abomination to them. And these are people of my own species from my own planet. Even stealing or killing, many humans have no such ethical constraints, and murder is even acceptable in war or punishment. There are those who disagree that adultery is wrong. Some societies think drinking alcohol is wrong but smoking marijuana is acceptable, counter to my own society.
There is little liklihood that they will be like us in any way, shape, or form.
Re:Yea (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think quadrupeds are more agile than bipeds - in fact, I would argue it the other way around - just watch a dog or cat in action. Bipeds like humans are better designed to scale trees by grabbing branches, however, and bipeds like birds benefit from less weight for unneeded limbs.
I think you meant to say that you do think that quadrupeds are more agile.
1) in the billions of years of earth history, our radio window of time is trivial and even if the alien races developed as fast or faster than us, they could be too far away for that radio signal to get here yet. For all we know, the aliens moved to tachyon communications and closed the radio wave era before we even set up.
While I concur that it is not unlikely that advanced aliens might use a non-radio based method of communication, I wouldn't jump to something like tachyons (faster than light particles which probably don't exist). More likely they simply use a signal we don't recognize, a method that doesn't propagate through empty space (for example: fiber optics), or aim their communication beams so precisely that we wouldn't have a chance to receive them unless they were directed exactly at us.
2) we have the technology to grow children in vats and sustain the human race and are already doing it to sustain some species like rare sharks that eat the rest of the brood while still in the womb. Once we get over the religious and ethical issues (e.g. superrace), it seems like a natural progression, at least. If the "mom" wanted to breast feed, she could then take hormones for that.
What the heck does that have to do with the likelihood of anthropomorphic aliens?
3) We've been sending out radio signals for what, a little more than 110 years, and we didn't start listening until much later. At best you are probably talking about 20000 stars that could have heard us in that time (I recall 100 years being about 15000, so I guesstimated), and much less could respond if they were listening. And that is assuming they are using radio waves, not, say, microwaves. For all we know, radio waves are annoying noises to them and they wear tinfoil hats.
Microwaves ARE radio waves... *WE* use microwaves for transmitting data. (in addition to most of the other parts of the EM spectrum) Do you think that radio only means FM and AM?
4) The assumptions are based on aliens followed a "European" style technological progression, but the only reason most of the world followed that progression was because of European expansionism. If America had been left untouched by Europe and/or China, how much do you think Native Americans tech would have progressed by now? My guess is not much.
That might be true, but there were also rather advanced pre-industrial civilizations present in the Americas before Europeans showed up. The Maya, for example. Given another thousand years or so, the Maya could easily have become a civilization as technologically advanced (or more) as europe was in the 15th century. That is a fraction of the blink of an eye in the time of the universe.
5) Our galaxy is unpredictable, and that probably is true for the majority of galaxies. Just because a meteor struck us and ended the age of dinosaurs doesn't mean it happened there, and maybe having a tiny brain and giant teeth was more valuable for a lot longer there.
True, dinosaurs existed for a lot longer than mammals have, and didn't evolve a technological civilization in that time, but that doesn't prove that it couldn't happen. Most likely they would have had to be warm blooded in order to have the energy budget for a large brain, but there is evidence to suggest that at least a few dinosaurs were warm blooded. So there's no way to say that it was impossible.
It might be unusual for a planet to remain as stable as earth has (even with the dino-killing chicxulub impact),