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A comment on NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth. Parent comment

Re:NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to E... by pdonis on Thursday July 23, 2015 @05:59PM (#9938775)
> I suspect that's unlikely, even if there were advanced life there for 2 billion years.

Why do you think so? "Continuity" doesn't have to be having the same government or the same political structure, or even the same physical form (the article itself talks about uploads and nanomachines). It just means continuity of technological development. It doesn't have to mean steady progress either; our civilization hasn't had that, yet in ten millennia or so we have progressed from basic agriculture to space travel. For this planet, we're talking about two million millennia, or 200,000 times the time we've had. All the variables we've observed in our civilization's history become rounding error on that timescale.

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Re:NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to E... by semi-extrinsic on Thursday July 23, 2015 @07:48PM (#9939216)
On those timescales mass extinction events (asteroid, supervolcano etc.) become rather probable, which I guess could be what GP was trying to say.
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Re:NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to E... by pdonis on Friday July 24, 2015 @12:56AM (#9940178)
A mass extinction event would mean there wouldn't be a civilization on the planet at all. That's certainly possible, but for this particular subthread I am taking as a premise that there is a civilization there.
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Re:NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to E... by unchocked on Thursday July 23, 2015 @07:37PM (#9939180)
Yes, I mean continuity of technological development. I suspect that the prior millennium’s dark ages are but a pale inkling of how far a civilization can collapse, especially given geological time scales. I also suspect that technological development can plateau for sociological reasons.
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Re:NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to E... by pdonis on Friday July 24, 2015 @12:58AM (#9940181)
Even during the dark ages here on Earth, there was technological advancement. Also, the dark ages weren't worldwide. I would be skeptical of a plateau in technological development for any significant length of time for the same reason: even if one part of the planet was in one, the rest of it wouldn't be.
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