7 ms·

Well one factor would go up (planets with life 1>2) and another would go down (planets with life developing intelligence 1>0.5), resulting in a wash. It does mo

Well one factor would go up (planets with life 1>2) and another would go down (planets with life developing intelligence 1>0.5), resulting in a wash. It does move towards giving additional degrees of freedom on those terms though, making the equation as a whole slightly less pseudo-science.

pavel_lishin 9y ago
Depends on their intelligence if we find them, right? They might be intelligent and tool-using, but hampered by their aquatic origins.
- delecti 9y ago
  The relevant terms (paraphrased) are: number that can have life, percent of those which do have life, percent of those which have intelligent life, percent of those that release signals into space. So that would just move the same math down one more step. Twice the number of planets which have life (whether you adjust "can have life" or just the percent of the above which do), but that cancels out with half as many either being intelligent or releasing signals.
  - Density 9y ago
    Intelligent and releasing within our immediate galactic vicinity. I don't understand why the aliens would waste power beaming directed and powerful signals into space. Do you think the BBC bothers broadcasting enough signal for the Martians to listen to their radio? I don't think that's a very profitable business model.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  To a fish, we're aliens. It must be terrifying.
  - bdamm 9y ago
    I get the comparison, but personally I think it only works if we found tool-using behavior in aquatic species that shows they are actively modifying their environment to improve their survivability, so that they can have some meaningful basis for judging us as like them. Such as dolphins using agriculture. Otherwise we're just part of the freak show up where there is more light and less pressure.
    - deadmetheny 9y ago
      Octopuses have been observed using tools, and we're very quickly determining that they are extremely intelligent. If they had longer lifespans and weren't solitary, who knows what they may have become.
      - Asooka 9y ago
        Given that they breed fast, I'm a bit surprised nobody has tried to breed sociable octopuses.
        piercebot 9y ago
        https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopus-city-observed-180964936/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopus-city-obser...
        robotbikes 9y ago
        I think there have been a few instances where they found enough octopi clustered that they were shown to be sociable. This article is about the Octopi cities https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopus-city-observed-180964936/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopus-city-obser...
        pavel_lishin 9y ago
        Not that sociable: http://metazoan.net/55-octlantis-media/ http://metazoan.net/55-octlantis-media/ > Octlantis is not in any sense a city. It is not a cooperatively built and maintained structure, designed to allow many individuals to live in close quarters. It is an unusually dense collection of individual dens, most of them dug into a bed of scallop shells.
- bochoh 9y ago
  Is is intriguing to me to consider the limitations of space travel if you were an aquatic organism. Simply moving that much of any fluid versus empty "air" space would make leaving your planet that much more difficult. That's not to mention the inherent issues of electricity and developing circuits underwater.
  - dogma1138 9y ago
    Underwater technological civilization isn’t possible, tool making is very limited, no fire, no complex chemistry, no real evolutionary path to a technological advance society without uplifting. While possibly there aren’t that many restrictions on where life can evolve and even where can different levels of intelligence can evolve there are likely quite a bit of restrictions on where and how technological intelligence can evolve. Which puts some restrictions or bias towards both biological/evolutionary traits and as well as environmental ones. While I think we’ll find life in very strange places eventually and life that will be very strange any technological species we might encounter would be something much more similar to us than to anything else.
    - debatem1 9y ago
      Why are you confident that underwater technical civilization isn't possible? It would seem to me that techniques like hydraulics would emerge quickly, and large pressure and temperature differentials over small distances are considerably more common and easier to harness underwater than above. Fabrication is certainly harder, but not impossibly so. Some weapons like thrusting spears might be easier to make and more advantageous in the water than on land, and those developed pretty early for us.
      - dogma1138 9y ago
        Because show me an evolutionary path into fine tool making and complex chemistry. Chemistry is virtually impossible underwater, were not talking about an octopus using a stick even some birds use tools that's not exactly what we would call a technological intelligence. No fire, no smelting no metalworking, no complex materials.
- nerfhammer 9y ago
  Basically. Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 150 million years. If the asteroid had never hit the Earth, maybe they still would. The earth is probably only inhabitable for another billion years or so and has been inhabitable for 4 billion years, so we're 80% of the way through the Earth's habitable life. Maybe it's not atypical that life-bearing planets don't end up producing a technologically advanced one. The Earth is an example of how a planet can have complex animal life for hundreds of millions of years without any of them being able to invent cake, and habitability is relatively temporary.
losteric 9y ago
The known probabilities will go down, but that evidence is very weak with a sample size of < 1 solar system. Personally, I've always assumed less than 100% of life-bearing planets will have intelligent life. Earth would have failed less than 1M years ago, and our species may not be around for long. The interesting question, to me, is how often does life arise? If we find two origins in our solar system... that would change everything.
- delecti 9y ago
  I suspect that life will occur pretty much everywhere it can. It seemed to have popped up about as early as it could have on our planet, and has adapted to just about every nook and cranny here. And I agree that intelligence is unlikely to be as ubiquitous as life is. It takes an awful lot of resources to grow brains as big as ours, and it's probably just not worth it most of the time.
  - losteric 9y ago
    I can't clearly describe this thought yet, but I believe life depends on an environment with many channels for releasing small amounts of entropy (and protection from destructive high energy levels). That's all we are, self-regulating reproducing entropy machines. Once life exists, it diversifies into every energy niche. Earth has an incredibly complex entropic ecosystem - sunlight, wind, rain/flowing water, lightning, tectonic plates recycling material, radioactive material, and lots of interesting molecules... it seems inevitable that life would evolve. The Moon? Solar radiation, and maybe some chemical reactions driven by solar radiation. No life. Mercury? Too much solar radiation, destroys anything depending on small energy deltas. Mars? Above-average entropy channels in the past, but it's pretty dead now
drewrv 9y ago
It would only be a wash if you currently believe the chance of developing intelligence is > 50%. To me, the fact that intelligence is rare on earth makes me think the odds of developing intelligence elsewhere is rare too.
- XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
  Depends on what you mean by Intelligence. We see tool use in many species, yet none of them are sending space ships. Maybe we should include an "industrialization" or "super-organization" to the criteria of aliens we'd want to trade with.
  - XorNot 9y ago
    Makes a lot of assumptions that multiple technological societies can survive the early competitive period too ( the one we're pretty obviously still in)
- njharman 9y ago
  How do you conclude that intelligence is rare on earth?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

pavel_lishin 9y ago

Depends on their intelligence if we find them, right? They might be intelligent and tool-using, but hampered by their aquatic origins.

delecti 9y ago
The relevant terms (paraphrased) are: number that can have life, percent of those which do have life, percent of those which have intelligent life, percent of those that release signals into space. So that would just move the same math down one more step. Twice the number of planets which have life (whether you adjust "can have life" or just the percent of the above which do), but that cancels out with half as many either being intelligent or releasing signals.
- Density 9y ago
  Intelligent and releasing within our immediate galactic vicinity. I don't understand why the aliens would waste power beaming directed and powerful signals into space. Do you think the BBC bothers broadcasting enough signal for the Martians to listen to their radio? I don't think that's a very profitable business model.
sillysaurus3 9y ago
To a fish, we're aliens. It must be terrifying.
- bdamm 9y ago
  I get the comparison, but personally I think it only works if we found tool-using behavior in aquatic species that shows they are actively modifying their environment to improve their survivability, so that they can have some meaningful basis for judging us as like them. Such as dolphins using agriculture. Otherwise we're just part of the freak show up where there is more light and less pressure.
  - deadmetheny 9y ago
    Octopuses have been observed using tools, and we're very quickly determining that they are extremely intelligent. If they had longer lifespans and weren't solitary, who knows what they may have become.
    - Asooka 9y ago
      Given that they breed fast, I'm a bit surprised nobody has tried to breed sociable octopuses.
      - piercebot 9y ago
        https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopus-city-observed-180964936/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopus-city-obser...
      - robotbikes 9y ago
        I think there have been a few instances where they found enough octopi clustered that they were shown to be sociable. This article is about the Octopi cities https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopus-city-observed-180964936/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopus-city-obser...
        pavel_lishin 9y ago
        Not that sociable: http://metazoan.net/55-octlantis-media/ http://metazoan.net/55-octlantis-media/ > Octlantis is not in any sense a city. It is not a cooperatively built and maintained structure, designed to allow many individuals to live in close quarters. It is an unusually dense collection of individual dens, most of them dug into a bed of scallop shells.
bochoh 9y ago
Is is intriguing to me to consider the limitations of space travel if you were an aquatic organism. Simply moving that much of any fluid versus empty "air" space would make leaving your planet that much more difficult. That's not to mention the inherent issues of electricity and developing circuits underwater.
- dogma1138 9y ago
  Underwater technological civilization isn’t possible, tool making is very limited, no fire, no complex chemistry, no real evolutionary path to a technological advance society without uplifting. While possibly there aren’t that many restrictions on where life can evolve and even where can different levels of intelligence can evolve there are likely quite a bit of restrictions on where and how technological intelligence can evolve. Which puts some restrictions or bias towards both biological/evolutionary traits and as well as environmental ones. While I think we’ll find life in very strange places eventually and life that will be very strange any technological species we might encounter would be something much more similar to us than to anything else.
  - debatem1 9y ago
    Why are you confident that underwater technical civilization isn't possible? It would seem to me that techniques like hydraulics would emerge quickly, and large pressure and temperature differentials over small distances are considerably more common and easier to harness underwater than above. Fabrication is certainly harder, but not impossibly so. Some weapons like thrusting spears might be easier to make and more advantageous in the water than on land, and those developed pretty early for us.
    - dogma1138 9y ago
      Because show me an evolutionary path into fine tool making and complex chemistry. Chemistry is virtually impossible underwater, were not talking about an octopus using a stick even some birds use tools that's not exactly what we would call a technological intelligence. No fire, no smelting no metalworking, no complex materials.
nerfhammer 9y ago
Basically. Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 150 million years. If the asteroid had never hit the Earth, maybe they still would. The earth is probably only inhabitable for another billion years or so and has been inhabitable for 4 billion years, so we're 80% of the way through the Earth's habitable life. Maybe it's not atypical that life-bearing planets don't end up producing a technologically advanced one. The Earth is an example of how a planet can have complex animal life for hundreds of millions of years without any of them being able to invent cake, and habitability is relatively temporary.

losteric 9y ago

The known probabilities will go down, but that evidence is very weak with a sample size of < 1 solar system. Personally, I've always assumed less than 100% of life-bearing planets will have intelligent life. Earth would have failed less than 1M years ago, and our species may not be around for long. The interesting question, to me, is how often does life arise? If we find two origins in our solar system... that would change everything.

delecti 9y ago
I suspect that life will occur pretty much everywhere it can. It seemed to have popped up about as early as it could have on our planet, and has adapted to just about every nook and cranny here. And I agree that intelligence is unlikely to be as ubiquitous as life is. It takes an awful lot of resources to grow brains as big as ours, and it's probably just not worth it most of the time.
- losteric 9y ago
  I can't clearly describe this thought yet, but I believe life depends on an environment with many channels for releasing small amounts of entropy (and protection from destructive high energy levels). That's all we are, self-regulating reproducing entropy machines. Once life exists, it diversifies into every energy niche. Earth has an incredibly complex entropic ecosystem - sunlight, wind, rain/flowing water, lightning, tectonic plates recycling material, radioactive material, and lots of interesting molecules... it seems inevitable that life would evolve. The Moon? Solar radiation, and maybe some chemical reactions driven by solar radiation. No life. Mercury? Too much solar radiation, destroys anything depending on small energy deltas. Mars? Above-average entropy channels in the past, but it's pretty dead now

drewrv 9y ago

It would only be a wash if you currently believe the chance of developing intelligence is > 50%. To me, the fact that intelligence is rare on earth makes me think the odds of developing intelligence elsewhere is rare too.

XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
Depends on what you mean by Intelligence. We see tool use in many species, yet none of them are sending space ships. Maybe we should include an "industrialization" or "super-organization" to the criteria of aliens we'd want to trade with.
- XorNot 9y ago
  Makes a lot of assumptions that multiple technological societies can survive the early competitive period too ( the one we're pretty obviously still in)
njharman 9y ago
How do you conclude that intelligence is rare on earth?

deleted 9y ago

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