No civilisation on Phoebe thankfully as far as Command is concerned. They've been pootling around there for months with a ship in orbit scanning everything and anything and absolutely no sign of any civilisation at all.
That is it's other big advantage over Ophion of course. No intelligent native life.
It's an interesting one isn't it. But "life", in it's broadest sense, doesn't need intelligent life to be successful. Allow me to hand over to Professor Lynne Isbell, professor of anthropology at the University of California.
"Evolution isn't a progression. It's about how well organisms fit into their current environments." While extreme adaptability lets humans manipulate very different environments to meet our needs, that ability isn't enough to put humans at the top of the evolutionary ladder.
Take, for instance, ants. "Ants are as or more successful than we are," Isbell said "There are so many more ants in the world than humans, and they're well-adapted to where they're living."
While ants haven't developed writing (though they did invent agriculture long before we existed), they're hugely successful as a life form. They just aren't obviously excellent at all of the things humans tend to care about, which happens to be the things humans excel at.
"We have this idea of the fittest being the strongest or the fastest, but all you really have to do to win the evolutionary game is survive and reproduce."
So life doesn't need civilisation or indeed even creatures that can attain those heights. "Life" doesn't really care.
