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considering the universe is 13.8 billion years old aprox. how can a civilization be even more advanced than us if we both lived the same amount of time since the universe was born?. i mean what could boost the evolution of other beings when they started evolving since the big bang? maybe some elements in the universe that we haven't discover yet?

  • When i say advanced it means in all senses, mantally(therefore maybe this can cause more advanced technology), physically etc.
Brandon
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    Question cannot be answered. All answers possible are opinions as we cannot know the properties of something that has not been discovered. – TCAT117 May 06 '18 at 02:36
  • @TCAT117 The question is very broad, but it's possible to put tentative bounds on how much time an alien civilization might have had. For example, it seems impossible for life to develop before the third generation of stars. – Draconis May 06 '18 at 02:44
  • To make humans require heavy elements that are made and not released until stars die. These earlier "generations" of stars would all die out at different times and the next generations would be created at different times. So there's no single timescale to get to life. – StephenG - Help Ukraine May 06 '18 at 03:34
  • We'd need a few disposable, inhabited universes for a double-blind lab experiment in order to answe this question. Might take a few billion years too so don't hold your breath. – The Square-Cube Law May 06 '18 at 04:37
  • Welcome to worldbuilding.SE, Brandon. I regret that your first experience with us was so negative. Had you taken our [tour] and read through our [help] you would have discovered that ambiguous and unfocused questions are off-topic because they're difficult if not impossible to answer. For example, you're assuming that "advanced" means the same thing to us as it does to you. In reality, it means nothing to us (intentionally) because it gives us nothing to work with. The details are incredibly important. (continued) – JBH May 06 '18 at 15:46
  • A better way to ask this question might be "I'm developing a civilization more advanced than ours, what about the history of the universe would affect the choice of when my civilization could develop?" While some might still mark that question as "too broad," it's actually quite answerable - from the perspective of what we understand. Remember, when it comes to the history of the universe, sometimes what we state as fact is merely the best understanding we have at the moment. – JBH May 06 '18 at 15:47
  • The Universe is supposed to be 13,800,000,000 years old, Earth is believed to be 4,600,000,000 years old, the species Homo sapiens is believed to have appeared 300,000 years ago. The first agriculture began at least 11,500 years ago. If progress had been one percent faster since the first agriculture, we would have been as advanced as in 2018 in 1903, if one percent faster since the first Homo sapiens, we would have been as advanced as now in 982 BC, if one percent faster since the creation of Earth, we would be as advanced as now 46,000,000 years ago,.... – M. A. Golding May 07 '18 at 20:21
  • continued ... if a planet and its species advanced one percent faster since the beginning of the universe, they would have been as advanced as 2018 Earth 138,000,000 years ago. It is easy to imagine that a slight overall difference in the speed of evolution and/or technological advance could make a species thousands, millions, or billions of years more or less technologically advanced than Earth humans. Maybe Earth was the first planet with life, and humans the first intelligent species with technology, in the entire universe, but there is little reason to think that is true. – M. A. Golding May 07 '18 at 20:30
  • related –  May 07 '18 at 23:30

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Human evolution didn't start at the Big Bang: there was a very long period before the first stars were formed, and then two generations of stars were born and died before our Sun. After our Sun formed, it was even longer before the planets were created, and then for the Earth to cool down and become habitable. At that point, life itself had to form, and only then did the actual evolution happen.

Alien life probably couldn't have started before the third generation of stars, because of a lack of metals ("metals" in the astronomical sense meaning "anything that's not hydrogen"). But their planet could have become habitable much earlier, and the random processes that created life and then created intelligent life might have happened far faster through pure chance. All in all, it's been estimated that an alien civilization could be approximately a billion years ahead of us without any unknown chemical elements.

EDIT: To respond to your updated question, evolution doesn't have much to do with technology once you reach a certain level of intelligence. Genetically, modern humans aren't much different from the ancient Egyptians six thousand years ago. But in that time we've gone from the bare beginnings of agriculture to space travel. As soon as humans evolved a way to communicate abstract ideas, cultural evolution outpaced biology.

Draconis
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