Embed Notice

@djsumdog
Here's an interesting though: what counts as an extinct civilization here? Would all humans have to die to call our civilization extinct? Or would we be deemed an extinct civilization even if we merely forever lost access to advanced technology, the thing that would give civilization status at the galactic scale? (imagine we simply run out of the resources needed to build that technology, and we're unable to find alternatives).

Cause I'm starting to think that the latter could be a reasonable possibility when it comes to alien life. Was watching a report earlier that it was predicted that we could run out of helium by the end of the century. Why is that important? Because it's used extensively during chip making these days (among other high tech uses). How fast would our civilization collapse if we suddenly were never able to make CPUs at least as powerful as current Ryzen or Threadripper?
There are countless rare elements our technology depends on, and running out of even a single one could radically change society. For the most of them, you at least can argue you'd spend whatever energy needed to recycle them. But for helium... when that escapes into the atmosphere, it's gone.

So imagine the galaxy, filled with 10,000 worlds, where civilizations maybe even more advanced then us existed, but they still couldn't travel between solar systems, they couldn't gather up the resources of other worlds, and once they ran out of critical resources on their world, they slowly reverted back to a feudal society. They could be even more, 100,000, 1 million, 100 million, and we'd never know, because their small window of technological prowess, of being able to communicate via powerful radio signals, has already passed long ago, before we discovered steam engines even.

How tragic would that be? A galaxy filled with beings as smart as us, but without the resources to actually put their intelligence to use.