Astronomers Detect a Possible Signature of Life on a Distant Planet

Maybe look for signs of chemistry that indicates industry? Teflon, by-products of steel-making, plastics, something like that? Signs of intelligent(?) life.

Chemistry that indicates industry is signs of industry. In earth timescales, industry existed for effectively 0% of the time. Life existed for significantly longer though.

Even if there's life in lots of places, there may be no industry as we understand it anywhere else in the universe.

The thing we keep on neglecting to mention is that life on earth actually happened pretty quickly in the time scale of the universe. I can't remember but I think we're one of the earliest points for life in the "broad" time scale. I wouldn't be surprised if stastically we're some of the first intelligent life, or the first wave.

Our generation time is probably too slow for us to be the first wave. I’d expect that title to belong to something that looks like a pile of snot on a table but under a microscope looks like a neural network.

A key limitation is that the early universe had virtually no heavy elements whatsoever, and it is far too fantastical to suppose there might have been life in the form of hydrogen-positron crystals or whatever. It took billions of years of supernovas for protoplanetary disks to include metals, complex organic molecules, etc, and perhaps even longer to make planets with enough chemical entropy to support life.

Even still much of our evolution as complex organisms were far slower than our unicellular cousins. Bacteria have conquered every place on earth and humans have not. They probably took advantage of us to colonize the moon already. They have adapted a plethora of unique systems thanks the their ability to grow at log scale and rapidly adapt to any situation. The HN analogy would be a VC that could double the amount of potential startups it seeds every 20 minutes. Meanwhile over in the Homo genus only one subspecies has limped along to this day with severely diminished genetic diversity to boot in many large populations, with selective pressures probably not directly applied to maximizing intelligence in the species long term much less survival.

Actually, we're already past the peak of star formation in the universe. So the universe is well on its way winding down.. less and less stars are being created. We're seeing the universe more middle aged than especially young

https://www.reddit.com/r/space/s/0oVjIo0XMi

But how many of those stars would have been suitable for life ?

A huge star that’s going to burn out quickly isn’t conducive to complex organisms

Also in a huge star there’s less material to form planets in the first place

There's talk of 'forever chemicals' produced by everything we do. Is evidence of industry going to just disappear? Forever is a long time.

This is why "forever chemicals" is a poor term for those pollutants. They take a long time to decay under natural conditions (kind of like nuclear waste) but they don't literally persist forever.