And the north star, Polaris, is a fraction the age of sharks at only 50-70 Mya (it's a trinary star system but the other two stars are much dimmer and not visible to the eye)
Also: life on earth is almost as old as the universe itself, within the same order of magnitude. 4.1 GYA (billion years ago) vs 13.8 GYA. We're old and intelligence is hard.
We'd almost certainly find some way to kill them if we ever ran across any of them.
We're pretty good at accomplishing things like that.
One day, there's some space sharks swimming in a sea of liquid helium and doing deep dives to get to the smaller creatures that devour the seabed of diamonds.
The next day, we're figuring out how to use space shark squeezings in our fusion reactors.
Unless, of course, the space sharks figure out how to kill us first. They will probably try if that's useful to then.
> We'd almost certainly find some way to kill them if we ever ran across any of them
There is a credible argument that what the literature terms genocidal tendencies—where conflict isn’t resolved when it ends, but when the enemy is destroyed—is a precondition for conquering a world. So if we met space sharks, barring enlightenment, they’d probably seek to destroy us, too.
That's not that early, no? There was probably enough C, H, N, O, P, S, Na atoms for life to start 10B years ago. You probably couldnt rely on iron being everywhere though but that's not such a hard requirement.
