Humankind is unlikely to be the universe's first civilization

How would the Kryptonians view this alien from Earth?

"The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space." by Carl Sagan.

If there was only us in the whole history of the universe, the probability would be less than one in 10 billion trillion. That is less than 1/1000000000000000000000000. Billions of trillions of stars exist only for us to follow the Kardashians? Seems like a pretty weird plan from the Big (wo)man upstairs. Or there's no such plan at all? And civilizations are all around us, in both space and time? Blooming and fading like wildflowers?

From thescienceexplorer.com: "Humans Are Probably Not the Universe’s First Advanced Civilization"

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Using this method, Frank and Sullivan calculated how unlikely life would be if there has never been another example of intelligent life among the universe’s twenty billion trillion stars, or even among just our own Milky Way galaxy’s hundred billion.

The results? Less than one in ten billion trillion. "To me, this implies that other intelligent, technology producing species very likely have evolved before us," said Frank. And when the equation is scaled down to include just our galaxy, the numbers are not as extreme.

However, the universe is more than 13 billion years old. "That means that even if there have been a thousand civilizations in our own galaxy, if they live only as long as we have been around -- roughly ten thousand years — then all of them are likely already extinct," explained Sullivan. "And others won't evolve until we are long gone."

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One million immigrants are still not enough to turn Germany's demographics around.

If only more could sing the Internationale!

Welcoming a big group of refugees like in 2015 may still, technically, not be enough to turn Germany's demography around. Can many more be realistically brought in under a democratic regime, where a big part of the already present population will use votes to defend their interests? And immigration would only delay the aging problem for a while, until the immigrants' children become locals, with local reproductive patterns. Some countries may choose the Japanese path where, instead of immigration, they are building robotic exo-skeletons to help 70-years-olds jogging around? Immigration may be a good idea for individual nations, yet it won't work on the planetary scale half a century from now, when the likes of Mexico, India... will have also aged. Unless we allowed in some E.T. immigrants?

From Quartz: "Not even a million migrants will reverse Germany’s looming demographic decline"

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While the record number of migrants entering the country will slightly increase the population, not even a million migrants will reverse Germany’s long-term population decline. Olga Poetzsch, a spokesperson for the Federal Statistics Office, said that a look at the past shows that phases of high net immigration to Germany are usually followed by sharp drops.

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The latest population projections still predict a long-term shrinkage, for two reasons, says Poetzsch. The large cohort of “baby boomers” (those born between 1955 and 1965, approximately) will start to die off, pushing annual deaths above one million. At the same time, the number of women of child-bearing age will decrease. Even if the birth rate jumped from 1.4 to 1.6 children per woman, overall births would still decline in the long term.

“Developments in fertility and mortality that might prevent such high numbers for the deficit of births are currently not in sight,” Poetzsch adds.

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