I’ve now updated toward a higher chance life re-evolves and a lower chance on some unknown filter because we can see that the primate to intelligent civilization time gap is quite small.
That makes sense. It looks like humans branched off chimpanzees just 5.5 M years (= (5 + 6)/2*10^6) ago. Assuming the time from chimpanzees to a species similar to humans follows an exponential distribution with a mean equal to that time, the probability of not recovering after human extinction in the 1 billion years during which Earth will remain habitable would be only 1.09*10^-79 (= e^(-10^9/(5.5*10^6))). The probability of not recovering is higher due to model uncertainty. The time to recover may follow a different distribution.
In addition, recovery can be harder for other risks:
Catastrophes wiping out more species in humans’ evolutionary past (e.g. the impact of a large comet) would have a longer expected recovery time, and therefore imply a lower chance of recovery during the time Earth will remain habitable.
I’ve now updated toward a higher chance life re-evolves and a lower chance on some unknown filter because we can see that the primate to intelligent civilization time gap is quite small.
That makes sense. It looks like humans branched off chimpanzees just 5.5 M years (= (5 + 6)/2*10^6) ago. Assuming the time from chimpanzees to a species similar to humans follows an exponential distribution with a mean equal to that time, the probability of not recovering after human extinction in the 1 billion years during which Earth will remain habitable would be only 1.09*10^-79 (= e^(-10^9/(5.5*10^6))). The probability of not recovering is higher due to model uncertainty. The time to recover may follow a different distribution.
In addition, recovery can be harder for other risks:
Catastrophes wiping out more species in humans’ evolutionary past (e.g. the impact of a large comet) would have a longer expected recovery time, and therefore imply a lower chance of recovery during the time Earth will remain habitable.
As I said above, I estimated a 0.0513 % chance of not fully recovering from a repetition of the last mass extinction 66 M years ago, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.
A rogue AI would not allow another species to take control.