Life would likely be different though; I'd be curious what filled primate's niche before the asteroid.
In one episode, they finally believe themselves to be "home". Until, late in the episode, one of them notices that the Golden Gate Bridge is blue. Supposedly, nothing else is even slightly different than the one they are from.
Well, if we examine that premise, it's pretty dumb. At some point in the 1930s when it was built, someone had to source the paint for the damned thing. The plant that made the paint, even if it was the same one, used different pigments. Mined somewhere other than where they found the raw materials for whatever color of orange the bridge really is. Each of these slight changes, 70 years before the protagonists showed up, would have caused even bigger changes. Trucks taking different routes, causing different traffic patterns, different delays. Suddenly, people are being conceived 5 minutes earlier, or 5 minutes later (or not at all). It's doubtful that anyone born after whenever the divergence occurred (whenever that was) is genetically identical. Doubtful that anyone born even half a generation later has the same birth name.
Pretty safe to say if the dinosaurs weren't godbombed, there wouldn't be humans. The number of magical convergences is too high, even for a shorter period of time.
An alternate idea is that mammals, due to some survivability superiority, were the inevitable outcome and that god-bombing only accelerated us to that. The butterfly effect is sci-fi.
If you want wild speculation, imagine there was no accelerant and lizard-people eventually ruled the planet — perhaps in the way we're headed, they would end up god-bombing themselves ... and then finally the mammals get their (long over) due.
Popular opinion seems to be that the cockroaches are waiting their turn.
After the KT event that killed the dinosaurs, mammals sought to fill the niches left by dinosaurs. They grew big and huge. The few dinos that did survive, sat at the top of the food chain, enormous flightless birds. Sharks took over in the water because all the reptiles that were there were gone. It took mammals 40 million years after the bomb dropped to slowly spread over and gently outcompete the big bads. Collectively.
But it couldn't have happened in the first place without Giant Meteor making the choice for us. The Cretaceous was just that gnarly, and it would have only gotten gnarlier. The world found a local maximum, and then that maximum got flattened. The only thing that could have ended it, did.
But just because some mammal or another evolves into a sapient doesn't make that sapient "human" in the way we're using the word in this context.
The path from the little critters that existed at the time of the dinosaurs to H. sapiens today is very specific, and we know of at least 2 or 3 bottleneck events in our recent evolutionary history. The idea that our species could have arisen anyway is beyond absurd. The universe does not work in this fashion.
Guess that's where I disagree with you.
Such that, at the end of it all, we have something that either or both looks like an anatomically modern human and would (hypothetically) be able to have fertile offspring with a H. sapiens human?
Because, I have to tell you, that's pretty batshit.
With rain forests, something would have filled the primate niche. That something might well have become human-like.
While humans faced genetic bottlenecks, I'm not sure that affected all primates the same.
Somehow finding a second planet with life seems statistically infinitely more significant - the whole thing right now is a data experiment, and for now earth (as far as we know) is an anomoly - a single "positive" data point across thousands and thousands of "negative" data points.
Can we even definitely say there is not life anywhere on Mars or Mercury, nor has there ever been?
First couple billion years was all that, and they still are the vast majority of organisms. And eukaryotes seem to have evolved (only once!) pretty much by chance and not by necessity.
Chances are the galaxy is teaming with that kind of thing, but what we get excited about as "life" (stuff like us) is exceedingly rare, and there's no reason to assume that next-level "complex" life will exist in a form we even recognize, if it exists at all.
Totally get that post industrial life is theoretically easier to detect via radio signals etc but the article didn't seem to specify anything so particular.
I don't personally deny that there could be life in other galaxies, but equally, there could be angels dancing on the tip of a hairpin. Maybe there are, but neither can affect my life in any way.
Materialistic thinking. If confirmation of life beyond earth would not have a psyche-altering effect on you, I would ask if you were human?
Besides that, confirmation of extra-terrestrial life would have immense effect on most things here on Earth, material or not.
We would just need to wait for "some time". ;)
Seems like the chances of finding intelligent life on a planet vs. plain ol' plants and sponges life must be markedly smaller. Humans have existed on this planet for what fraction of the whole of life on this planet?
Of course, that's from one data set — and one in fact where the jury's still out as to our longevity as a species.
Sci-fi haș me thinking that pretty much any planet with life also has intelligent life but that doesn't ring true when you look at the numbers.