Are We the First Civilization in the Universe?

In December 1974, an astrophysicist in Boulder, Colorado sent a short paper to the Royal Astronomical Society. Its last sentence said that we are probably the first civilization in our galaxy. Astronomers almost never write sentences like that.

Fifty years later the question has grown to the whole universe, and the evidence has split in two. In the same week of October 2015, one paper concluded that someone almost certainly came before us, and another concluded that the Earth is one of the earliest worlds the universe will ever make.

Both are built on real data. Only one of them can be describing the universe you live in, and the measurements that could decide it are already under way.
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Credits:
NASA
ESA: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Vi... (Visual assets provided by the European Space Agency - ESA. Used under the professional broadcasting authorization.)
ESO: https://www.eso.org/public/videos/
Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ma...
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