5 ms·

I think intelligence is overrated in the grand scheme of life, so "alien life" would probably baffle us. Survival of the fittest on Earth is worth nothing if th

by DrNuke 11y ago

I think intelligence is overrated in the grand scheme of life, so "alien life" would probably baffle us. Survival of the fittest on Earth is worth nothing if the fittest die as well. Evolution would be slower without intelligence but who cares, is there a race out there?

hacker_9 11y ago
Tell that to the chickens you eat.
simonh 11y ago
Alien life would still have to be based on the same chemical and physical laws as terrestrial life, so while I'm sure it would be challenging to understand it shouldn't be an intractable problem. In the end, it's all just chemical reactions. If the fittest die as well everything's dead, so no more life. Not sure what you mean by evolution being slower without intelligence. I'd expect the opposite. Intelligence means you can adapt to your environment behaviourally and technologically, instead of biologically so natural selection becomes less of a factor.
- ZeroFries 11y ago
  Evolution is faster with intelligence because you get more advanced sexual selection
  - simonh 11y ago
    Can you clarify what you mean by advanced? Edit: I can't reply to your reply, but I can edit this post. Unless the form that mate selection takes radically diverges from evolved patterns I don;t see how that makes much difference. Since survival for intelligent species is much more loosely coupled to their biology I don't see why sexual selection strategies would mitigate against that. It seems to me they'd follow the same pattern in devaluing biological fitness criteria as not being as significant as they were pre-sentience.
    - harryjo 11y ago
      Intelligent individuals can be very quirkily selective with who they mate, dooming otherwise viable genetic lines to non-reproduction.
    - RevRal 11y ago
      (You're probably already aware of this but just in case you're not...) HN restricts the timing of replies deeper into conversations, sometimes annoying but it suppresses flame wars and what-have-yous.
- macawfish 11y ago
  Why would it have to be based on the same chemical and physical laws? That's a huge assumption!
  - simonh 11y ago
    It's only an assumption that, existing in the same universe as us, they would be subject to the physical and chemical laws of that universe. Or are you considering aliens residing in other universes?
  - yoklov 11y ago
    Because those are, as far as we know, constant throughout the universe?
  - bsder 11y ago
    First, as far as we know, physics doesn't change depending upon universe position. So, we assume that life has to obey our standard rules of physics. Second, the chemistry of life balances on a particular set of characteristics: 1) Water is an extremely unusual molecule. It has much more varied reactions than just about any other solvent. This puts life in a particular temperature band. 2) Carbon chemistry is very energetically favorable relative to the other options. Binding energies are close enough that swapping around carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen atoms doesn't take excessive amounts of energy. 3) Carbon, Oxygen, Nitrogen, and Hydrogen are all relatively close to one another in size as well. While carbon chemistry does borrow from higher in the periodic table, that tends to be the exception. While intelligent life will likely be completely different from us, it's very likely that the underlying chemistry is going to be very similar. The interesting question will be whether we have exactly the same basis DNA pairs. There has been recent successful work to synthesize new "unnatural" base pairs which can then be replicated in organisms.
    - VLM 11y ago
      Embrace and extend: 4) "Room temps" are really comfy for using enzymes to perform energetically infeasible reactions. Too cold and life is too slow to survive and much hotter and you get thermal decomposition faster than life can grow. Its chemically universal... we have the technology to do o-chem and biochem under much weirder conditions than where it actually works best. 5) Trace elements. Despite huge evolutionary pressure and no small amount of experimenting with blood chemistry we're still stuck with red iron based blood. Imagine if you could make blood out of pure protein or even just carbohydrates... But no, every red blooded animal on the planet is stuck refining bioavailable iron, no matter how much of a PITA that is. Would not be surprised if space aliens bleed red like us. 6) Water is awesome for buffer chemistry and this feeds back into your point #1 and my point #4 but homeostasis in the blood or innards in general would be nearly impossible under any other chemistry. I would not be surprised at all if space aliens were quite familiar with hemoglobin, chlorophyll, some of the cycles like the Krebs cycle. Krebs is very complicated and PITA but most earth life depends on it because it works, if something better were possible, it would have gone extinct half a billion years ago... It would be a fun race, seeing if human and space alien physicists or biochemists start communicating first. My money is on the biochemists, more shared background.
awinter-py 11y ago
yes, survival of the fittest makes less sense if the fittest don't survive
nsajko 11y ago
> Survival of the fittest on Earth is worth nothing if the fittest die as well. I'm not sure what are you saying here. The "fittest" are the ones who don't die (before reproducing).
maus42 11y ago
>Evolution would be slower without intelligence but who cares, is there a race out there? I'm quite certain that does not have anything to do with "speed of evolution". I am not a biologist, so I can't come up with a better source, but I'd suggest that everyone would very carefully study at least the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution which looks like a reasonable summary.

by DrNuke 11y ago

hacker_9 11y ago

Tell that to the chickens you eat.

simonh 11y ago

Alien life would still have to be based on the same chemical and physical laws as terrestrial life, so while I'm sure it would be challenging to understand it shouldn't be an intractable problem. In the end, it's all just chemical reactions. If the fittest die as well everything's dead, so no more life. Not sure what you mean by evolution being slower without intelligence. I'd expect the opposite. Intelligence means you can adapt to your environment behaviourally and technologically, instead of biologically so natural selection becomes less of a factor.

ZeroFries 11y ago
Evolution is faster with intelligence because you get more advanced sexual selection
- simonh 11y ago
  Can you clarify what you mean by advanced? Edit: I can't reply to your reply, but I can edit this post. Unless the form that mate selection takes radically diverges from evolved patterns I don;t see how that makes much difference. Since survival for intelligent species is much more loosely coupled to their biology I don't see why sexual selection strategies would mitigate against that. It seems to me they'd follow the same pattern in devaluing biological fitness criteria as not being as significant as they were pre-sentience.
  - harryjo 11y ago
    Intelligent individuals can be very quirkily selective with who they mate, dooming otherwise viable genetic lines to non-reproduction.
  - RevRal 11y ago
    (You're probably already aware of this but just in case you're not...) HN restricts the timing of replies deeper into conversations, sometimes annoying but it suppresses flame wars and what-have-yous.
macawfish 11y ago
Why would it have to be based on the same chemical and physical laws? That's a huge assumption!
- simonh 11y ago
  It's only an assumption that, existing in the same universe as us, they would be subject to the physical and chemical laws of that universe. Or are you considering aliens residing in other universes?
- yoklov 11y ago
  Because those are, as far as we know, constant throughout the universe?
- bsder 11y ago
  First, as far as we know, physics doesn't change depending upon universe position. So, we assume that life has to obey our standard rules of physics. Second, the chemistry of life balances on a particular set of characteristics: 1) Water is an extremely unusual molecule. It has much more varied reactions than just about any other solvent. This puts life in a particular temperature band. 2) Carbon chemistry is very energetically favorable relative to the other options. Binding energies are close enough that swapping around carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen atoms doesn't take excessive amounts of energy. 3) Carbon, Oxygen, Nitrogen, and Hydrogen are all relatively close to one another in size as well. While carbon chemistry does borrow from higher in the periodic table, that tends to be the exception. While intelligent life will likely be completely different from us, it's very likely that the underlying chemistry is going to be very similar. The interesting question will be whether we have exactly the same basis DNA pairs. There has been recent successful work to synthesize new "unnatural" base pairs which can then be replicated in organisms.
  - VLM 11y ago
    Embrace and extend: 4) "Room temps" are really comfy for using enzymes to perform energetically infeasible reactions. Too cold and life is too slow to survive and much hotter and you get thermal decomposition faster than life can grow. Its chemically universal... we have the technology to do o-chem and biochem under much weirder conditions than where it actually works best. 5) Trace elements. Despite huge evolutionary pressure and no small amount of experimenting with blood chemistry we're still stuck with red iron based blood. Imagine if you could make blood out of pure protein or even just carbohydrates... But no, every red blooded animal on the planet is stuck refining bioavailable iron, no matter how much of a PITA that is. Would not be surprised if space aliens bleed red like us. 6) Water is awesome for buffer chemistry and this feeds back into your point #1 and my point #4 but homeostasis in the blood or innards in general would be nearly impossible under any other chemistry. I would not be surprised at all if space aliens were quite familiar with hemoglobin, chlorophyll, some of the cycles like the Krebs cycle. Krebs is very complicated and PITA but most earth life depends on it because it works, if something better were possible, it would have gone extinct half a billion years ago... It would be a fun race, seeing if human and space alien physicists or biochemists start communicating first. My money is on the biochemists, more shared background.

awinter-py 11y ago

yes, survival of the fittest makes less sense if the fittest don't survive

nsajko 11y ago

> Survival of the fittest on Earth is worth nothing if the fittest die as well. I'm not sure what are you saying here. The "fittest" are the ones who don't die (before reproducing).

maus42 11y ago

>Evolution would be slower without intelligence but who cares, is there a race out there? I'm quite certain that does not have anything to do with "speed of evolution". I am not a biologist, so I can't come up with a better source, but I'd suggest that everyone would very carefully study at least the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution which looks like a reasonable summary.