The Milky Way’s Past Civilisations Should Be Commemorated

Avi Loeb has published another fascinating article that poses an interesting statement.

This math implies roughly one dead Galactic civilization per living human currently on Earth. If we only knew the identities of these lost civilizations, then each of us could have lit one candle in memory of one of them.

His reasoning is as follows: our sun is 4.6 billion years old, and yet according to historical star formations of our galaxy, more than half the sun-like stars in the Milky Way formed 1 billion years before our own sun.

If some of these suns hosted a habitable world that led to the emergence of an itelligent spieces a billion years ago then it’s safe to postulate that most of them would have suffered a catastrophic end. Why? Because predictions show that our own sun will brighten and turn our beautiful blue planet into a dry barren desert, like Mars.

Avi says “In that case, it would be appropriate for us, as cosmic citizens of the Milky-Way galaxy, to hold a memorial service. once a year commemorating the civilizations that may have tragically died this way within our galaxy. Their number is ten billion if about a fifth of the Earth-analogs had a similar biological history to that of Earth.”

Read the full story at Avi’s Medium page.