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I've always liked to entertain the idea that highly advanced intelligent life is an evolutionary dead-end. After all if human beings drive themselves to extinct

I've always liked to entertain the idea that highly advanced intelligent life is an evolutionary dead-end. After all if human beings drive themselves to extinction in the next 10,000 or 50,000 years what did our intelligence get us? It didn't enable us to survive better than other species. And what if a lot of intelligent species run into this problem? Where the level of knowledge and power they amass far outstrips what they've evolved to responsibly handle. And the result is intelligent species often manage to destroy themselves before they become wise enough to avoid that.

magduf 8y ago
It's interesting how insightful, thoughtful comments like this get modded down to hell on HN because they offend someone's religious beliefs. You're right, all evidence so far does point to us driving ourselves to extinction eventually, and the way things are going, it's likely to be a lot less than 10k years. And the idea of other intelligent species running into this problem isn't a new idea, it's long been a theory among searchers of extraterrestrial life, called the "great filter theory".
- perl4ever 8y ago
  The idea that humanity is sinful and unworthy and the end of the world is near or at least inevitable has a very long and deep religious background. Yet these themes frequently crop up among those who are making a point of the inferiority of religious thought. I have a certain distaste for how much people apparently love to think in terms of labels rather than substance. I often think downvoting is overdone, though.
  - magduf 8y ago
    >The idea that humanity is sinful and unworthy and the end of the world is near or at least inevitable has a very long and deep religious background. Really? I haven't seen that at all. If you're talking about Christianity and the whole "end times" stuff, that's a little different: that isn't humanity "driving itself to extinction", that's some deity deciding that humans are bad and proactively eliminating them. I don't see that as the same thing at all. In fact, why I said this seemed to be offending peoples' religious ideals is that I think the idea of humans making themselves extinct directly counters this religious idea that a deity is the one in charge of humans' fate. To them, if humans are all eliminated, it can't possibly be because humans did it to themselves (as this is what they'd call a "humanistic" or "secular" idea), but could only happen because their deity made it so. And conversely, as long as humans are "good" enough (meaning they worship the deity enough, nothing about them wrecking their environment or obliterating themselves with nuclear weapons) then the deity will protect them from their own mistakes.
    - perl4ever 8y ago
      "Humanity" as an entity with purpose or a mind is substantively the same as a deity from my perspective. It's an abstract concept that is analogous to a single human, that is supposed to exist without a specific location in space and time, and has free will, causes things to happen and/or is blamed for them. And I see the same lack of empirical evidence for the concept. So, yes, you may not see it as the same thing, but I quite definitely do.
eloff 8y ago
I constantly hear people saying we're going to make ourselves extinct, but have you ever stopped to think about how hard that is? We're the most adaptable species ever to live on this planet . There are 8 billion of us on every continent except Antarctica, and we've found ways to codify and share our collective knowledge. Climate disasters, widespread thermonuclear wars, etc would be horrifying and would likely kill a great many or even a majority of humans. But even that wouldn't do much more than slow us down a few hundred years. Even an a massive impact from space on the scale of the Chicxulub impact would kill off most people, and collapse civilization - but we'd rise again in less than a thousand years. It's very hard to think of a scenario that would actually end us. One thing I've speculated about is maybe we unlock some awful power that we can't control. For example, if it were easy for anybody to distill antimatter in their garage in large quantities. Because there are always going to be those among us who want to burn it all down and who would destroy everything if they could. In a hypothetical world where terrorists and rampagers attacked with kilograms of antimatter, that might make it difficult to maintain a level of civilization for long periods of time.
- senorjazz 8y ago
  > but we'd rise again in less than a thousand years. Would we though? I am not so sure starting from scratch is going to possible. For example, all the easy oil is gone. All the easy mining, is gone. We can get at it because we have the technology. If 99% of the human species was wiped out, yes we would continue to exist, but I would not expect many great civilisations to flourish again
  - ajross 8y ago
    The bit about energy sources is true, though a little spun. It's true that oil is gone. Coal is still plentiful, even at the surface. And the "hole" in industrial development where we depended on oil specifically has been less than 100 years or so, and already seems to be reaching its end. It's not impossible to imagine a future society skipping liquid fuels (and most of aviation) and still making its way to the renewable revolution. > All the easy mining, is gone. This bit is wrong, though. You can literally walk through a demolition site and pick up rebar and aluminum by the ton. Access to a single ancient reactor would give you the equivalent of decades of mining from any single uranium site. All our city building has had the effect of concentrating easily exploitable "ore" resources, not depleting them.
perl4ever 8y ago
I think "intelligent" is perhaps the wrong adjective to distinguish humans. I would suggest "social" is a better one, as we are to other primates what ants or bees are to nonsocial insects. It's not the intelligence of the individual so much as the "programmability". Thus, I doubt it's an evolutionary dead end, as when you look at social organization from a broader view, it's developed in many different species. Even multicellular life itself seems like social organization at a lower, earlier level of abstraction. I would agree that an interplanetary/interstellar civilization is something that may never come to pass, but I don't see it as a judgement on the capacity of particular life on earth to adapt, but rather a result of the physical laws that constrain all life, particularly delta-V and the speed of light.

magduf 8y ago

It's interesting how insightful, thoughtful comments like this get modded down to hell on HN because they offend someone's religious beliefs. You're right, all evidence so far does point to us driving ourselves to extinction eventually, and the way things are going, it's likely to be a lot less than 10k years. And the idea of other intelligent species running into this problem isn't a new idea, it's long been a theory among searchers of extraterrestrial life, called the "great filter theory".

perl4ever 8y ago
The idea that humanity is sinful and unworthy and the end of the world is near or at least inevitable has a very long and deep religious background. Yet these themes frequently crop up among those who are making a point of the inferiority of religious thought. I have a certain distaste for how much people apparently love to think in terms of labels rather than substance. I often think downvoting is overdone, though.
- magduf 8y ago
  >The idea that humanity is sinful and unworthy and the end of the world is near or at least inevitable has a very long and deep religious background. Really? I haven't seen that at all. If you're talking about Christianity and the whole "end times" stuff, that's a little different: that isn't humanity "driving itself to extinction", that's some deity deciding that humans are bad and proactively eliminating them. I don't see that as the same thing at all. In fact, why I said this seemed to be offending peoples' religious ideals is that I think the idea of humans making themselves extinct directly counters this religious idea that a deity is the one in charge of humans' fate. To them, if humans are all eliminated, it can't possibly be because humans did it to themselves (as this is what they'd call a "humanistic" or "secular" idea), but could only happen because their deity made it so. And conversely, as long as humans are "good" enough (meaning they worship the deity enough, nothing about them wrecking their environment or obliterating themselves with nuclear weapons) then the deity will protect them from their own mistakes.
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    "Humanity" as an entity with purpose or a mind is substantively the same as a deity from my perspective. It's an abstract concept that is analogous to a single human, that is supposed to exist without a specific location in space and time, and has free will, causes things to happen and/or is blamed for them. And I see the same lack of empirical evidence for the concept. So, yes, you may not see it as the same thing, but I quite definitely do.

eloff 8y ago

I constantly hear people saying we're going to make ourselves extinct, but have you ever stopped to think about how hard that is? We're the most adaptable species ever to live on this planet . There are 8 billion of us on every continent except Antarctica, and we've found ways to codify and share our collective knowledge. Climate disasters, widespread thermonuclear wars, etc would be horrifying and would likely kill a great many or even a majority of humans. But even that wouldn't do much more than slow us down a few hundred years. Even an a massive impact from space on the scale of the Chicxulub impact would kill off most people, and collapse civilization - but we'd rise again in less than a thousand years. It's very hard to think of a scenario that would actually end us. One thing I've speculated about is maybe we unlock some awful power that we can't control. For example, if it were easy for anybody to distill antimatter in their garage in large quantities. Because there are always going to be those among us who want to burn it all down and who would destroy everything if they could. In a hypothetical world where terrorists and rampagers attacked with kilograms of antimatter, that might make it difficult to maintain a level of civilization for long periods of time.

senorjazz 8y ago
> but we'd rise again in less than a thousand years. Would we though? I am not so sure starting from scratch is going to possible. For example, all the easy oil is gone. All the easy mining, is gone. We can get at it because we have the technology. If 99% of the human species was wiped out, yes we would continue to exist, but I would not expect many great civilisations to flourish again
- ajross 8y ago
  The bit about energy sources is true, though a little spun. It's true that oil is gone. Coal is still plentiful, even at the surface. And the "hole" in industrial development where we depended on oil specifically has been less than 100 years or so, and already seems to be reaching its end. It's not impossible to imagine a future society skipping liquid fuels (and most of aviation) and still making its way to the renewable revolution. > All the easy mining, is gone. This bit is wrong, though. You can literally walk through a demolition site and pick up rebar and aluminum by the ton. Access to a single ancient reactor would give you the equivalent of decades of mining from any single uranium site. All our city building has had the effect of concentrating easily exploitable "ore" resources, not depleting them.

perl4ever 8y ago

I think "intelligent" is perhaps the wrong adjective to distinguish humans. I would suggest "social" is a better one, as we are to other primates what ants or bees are to nonsocial insects. It's not the intelligence of the individual so much as the "programmability". Thus, I doubt it's an evolutionary dead end, as when you look at social organization from a broader view, it's developed in many different species. Even multicellular life itself seems like social organization at a lower, earlier level of abstraction. I would agree that an interplanetary/interstellar civilization is something that may never come to pass, but I don't see it as a judgement on the capacity of particular life on earth to adapt, but rather a result of the physical laws that constrain all life, particularly delta-V and the speed of light.