First-flush likelihood under a common-start, continuous evolutionary process
- 1Independent Researcher, Glasgow, UK
Abstract
We are close to being able to expand beyond our own planet, and we see nobody else doing it. The hard-steps model explains the silence by making civilisations rare, but Mills et al. (2025) argue that Earth's record gives poor support for improbable steps. If lineages usually get there in the end, the older ones had a large head start, and some should now be visible. We work out how large that head start may be, in flat space with perfect detection of expanded galaxies. A clock tied to each planet's birth must keep loud lineages extremely rare. A clock that starts from a shared cosmic event and carries progress between planets allows a lead of about 14 million years. Once lineage durations vary independently, the sky constrains our rank rather than the lead: we sit in a thin first flush of emergences arriving around now, in our galaxy and in others. Scored by full non-indexical conditioning, this clock produces observers like us 10⁷ to 10⁹ times as often as a hard-steps lottery if expansion is loud, and ties with it if expansion is filtered, which puts a price on the loudness premise.
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BibTeX
@misc{fettes2026firstflush,
title = {{First-flush likelihood under a common-start, continuous evolutionary process}},
author = {Fergus Fettes},
howpublished = {Zenodo},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.23437191},
url = {https://zenodo.org/records/23437191},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - First-flush likelihood under a common-start, continuous evolutionary process
AU - Fergus Fettes
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/17
PB - Zenodo
DO - 10.5281/zenodo.23437191
UR - https://zenodo.org/records/23437191
AB - We are close to being able to expand beyond our own planet, and we see nobody else doing it. The hard-steps model explains the silence by making civilisations rare, but Mills et al. (2025) argue that Earth's record gives poor support for improbable steps. If lineages usually get there in the end, the older ones had a large head start, and some should now be visible. We work out how large that head start may be, in flat space with perfect detection of expanded galaxies. A clock tied to each planet's birth must keep loud lineages extremely rare. A clock that starts from a shared cosmic event and carries progress between planets allows a lead of about 14 million years. Once lineage durations vary independently, the sky constrains our rank rather than the lead: we sit in a thin first flush of emergences arriving around now, in our galaxy and in others. Scored by full non-indexical conditioning, this clock produces observers like us 10⁷ to 10⁹ times as often as a hard-steps lottery if expansion is loud, and ties with it if expansion is filtered, which puts a price on the loudness premise.
ER -