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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Janx" data-source="post: 6255113" data-attributes="member: 8835">I got interrupted, so I had to rewrite my response, hopefully the thought survives.The key thing your graph implies is that a species can go zero to Doctor Who in a blink of an eye in Universal scale. The Universe is 13 billion years old (or whatever), and the Earth is 4.5 billion years old.  Surely we don't need another billion years to achieve Doctor Who tech before the sun/earth dies.I would posit, that instead of measuring a species itself, which is a tiny subset of a planet's lifespan (at least by earth comparison), consider the species evolution time scale.  Life started on Eartth probably 3 billion years ago (fix the numnbers, I just made that up).  Let's assume we evolve into the Docotor Who-grade beings, so it's less about us being precisely human, so much as related to, in about have a billion years.So we need a time frame of 3.5 billion years to reach a point where we can save the species (or any/all of the remaining species from our planet).This time frame must coincide with starting soon enough and reaching the top, before the terminus of the planet or universe ending (as we've talked in the past about finding alien life, what if they haven't started yet to be found).So each candidate species needs to have spawned soon enough in the universe, and in their own solar system.  And they are going to need a 3.5 billion year uninterrupted running timeframe in order to pull this off.Now I suppose you can rule that a Who-level species NOW clearly spawned 3.5 billion years ago.  But it might be more tragic to have some species who are too late to the party.  Meaning they are just getting to (or have just reached it) to the right tech level, but the universe has decayed too far for them to have the resources to save it.For instance, Universe Expansion (again).  Let's say you could place barrier stations/repulsors that cover a large area, that you'd just encircle the universe.  However large an area these things can cover, you can only build 100 of them. And you need to place them so their radius of influence touches each other.  If you are too late in deploying them, the universe will have expanded PAST the point you can build the barrier at, and thus you are too late.</blockquote>

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