18 ms·

Possibly, but not the way to bet. Live appeared on Earth very soon after it started to solidify. That would tend to imply that starting life was pretty easy o

Possibly, but not the way to bet. Live appeared on Earth very soon after it started to solidify. That would tend to imply that starting life was pretty easy or, life arrived by some kind of panspermia mechanism. There is a next to infinitesimal chance that life started very quickly by some kind of once in billions of years magical circumstance. To go from life to beings like humanity it's pretty clear that intelligence tends to increase as life goes on. For example some birds so exceptional abilities and they are dinosaurs according to most current understandings. Octopus can be remarkably clever and their lineage split from the "animals with backbones" line long before there were animals with backbones. Nerves and nervous systems seem to have been reinvented by evolution several different times. Putting this altogether, it seems there's an excellent chance that primitive uni-cellular life evolves pretty readily and multi-cellular animals tend towards increased intelligence soon there after. There's an assumption that "advanced civilizations" will be communicating with TV and Radio because that's the best we've got. On average most advanced civilizations would have had their technology for much more than 150 years and very likely communicate with methods we are not aware of yet. So when it's asked "Where are they?" the answer is they are out there, talking up a storm, they're just not still using electromagnetic "smoke signals" to do it.

kungtotte 8y ago
Two other factors that play a big role in not detecting life in the universe is: 1) it's a really big place. It's likely we can't see that far yet. 2) Will we be here a million years from now? Two million? Other civilizations could have come and gone dozens of times in our galaxy alone before we were here. And dozens may come and go after we're gone.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  #1 is a lot crazier, and more like: "we can only look at specific places, our detectors can only detect things which degrade as distance increases, and we might not be listening at the right frequency. So even if there were a civilization in this tiny, tiny region of the universe we are looking at, if they are too far away/obscured by debris/gas clouds, using wavelengths we aren't actively monitoring, we don't see them.
  - ntsplnkv2 8y ago
    Okay that explains why we can't see them. Why can't they see us? All the arguments for life say "the universe is so big there has to be more life, and highly advanced civilizations somewhere." Assuming that, sure, we can't see them. But why hasn't some advanced civilization seen us?
    - craftyguy 8y ago
      Some thoughts (in no particular order): - some have, and have responded, but we aren't looking for them in the right place and in the right way - humans have only been able to actively send information into space since only about the 1950s (radio waves), and physics dictates that locations 80 light years away are just now starting to see that, provided they are looking in the right location and in the right way (and that they are technologically advanced enough to do so. - It could be that a sufficiently advanced civilization no longer has the capability to receive and transmit long-wave radio communications. Just like many computers now don't have any way to read a floppy disk, or if someone were trying to communicate via smoke signals, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who could understand it. - Space is so large that if a civilization several hundred light years away (an insignificant fraction of the size of our one galaxy, actually) sent us a message that we received and responded to, it's possible they could have collapsed by the time they receive our response. The converse is also true, they could have 'seen' us and sent a message, and we could collapse before we had a chance to receive it and respond.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - LeftTurnSignal 8y ago
      I always thought that if a civilization was so advanced, why would it spend time interacting with a world like ours? We may feel special, but that's only because we haven't found anything else. If they found hundreds (or more) of worlds like ours, then maybe we're just another dot on their galaxy map. Plus if the media is anything to go by, all we do is shoot each other. Might not be too exciting for a civilization who can travel amongst the stars.
- woogiewonka 8y ago
  Milky Way is estimated to be what... 13.5 billion years old. Humanity is 200,000 years old. The time span in which we are actually able to detect anything outside our own planet is what.. 100 years old? I suspect it's a lot more than a dozen times. If life is more likely to develop, then humans have only been able to look out into our own galaxy for an entire 0.00000074% existence of our galaxy. Now, let's say a civilization does not last more than 1 million years for whatever reason, that means we exist for a whopping 0.00074% age of the universe to date. I don't know if I did my math all wrong, but if correct there is an enormous chance that 2 civilzation's paths may never cross. We could be living right next to the remains of a civilization before us and never know it.
tannerwj 8y ago
"There is a next to infinitesimal chance that life started very quickly by some kind of once in billions of years magical circumstance." Tautology? There is a very small chance that something with a very small chance of happening happened...
- inimino 8y ago
  The intended meaning was that there's a small chance of something unlikely happening quickly. If it happened "quickly" (in geologic time) once conditions were favorable, that is evidence against it being enormously unlikely once those conditions obtained.
WalterBright 8y ago
It took a very long time to go from single cell to multi-cell, implying it is unlikely.
- cristianpascu 8y ago
  A billion years is a very long time if you wait in a railway station. But in milliseconds, for instance, as powers of 10 is a blink of an eye compared to the magnitude of the search space of configurations of a single protein.
  - MrQuincle 8y ago
    The context here is the lifetime of the universe. If that is 13 billion years, 1 billion is a considerable chunk. If I interpret you right, you state that we might be extremely lucky hitting on a valid configuration so fast. In other words, the distribution might be at average at e.g. 1000 billion years. What shape would the distribution have?
oldcynic 8y ago
Meh. Much more likely they, and we, don't make it past planetary overpopulation, climate change or any of the numerous other self-made catastrophes.
- gremlinsinc 8y ago
  Even asteroids, super nova's, cosmic radiation, bigger but dumber predators (Dinosaurs), etc.. lots of external factors could destroy a planet too, a planet is a fragile place, and keeping life on it is a fragile balance, it's a miracle we've lasted so long, imho.
  - wool_gather 8y ago
    None of these things is likely to actually be the end of life altogether, just life as it's known at the time. More asteroids won't make the Earth completely uninhabitable (just as it didn't the first time); nor will climate change (just as it hasn't before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event). They'll simply be the end of our current human civilization, along with plenty of other current species. Other forms of life may benefit tremendously; things will evolve to take advantage of the new circumstances.
    - annabellish 8y ago
      Those things probably won't escape the atmosphere, however. It would be much harder to bootstrap an energy-hungry civilisation any time within the next few billion years, as we've used most of the easily-accessible sources of fossil fuels. If human civilisation falls, whatever comes afterwards probably wouldn't be able to build a rocket, unless they wait for fossil fuels to regenerate.
      - wool_gather 8y ago
        Very true; the next global, technological civilization here would probably take tens of millions of years, if it happened at all.
ricree 8y ago
Multicellular life seems to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks. Life appeared very soon after it was possible, but a pretty huge chunk of the time since was limited to single cells.
- sliken 8y ago
  Why? Once the earth is covered by single cell organisms there's going to be an incentive for even the simplest of cooperation. Quorum sensing can help reproduction, survival, collecting food, surviving drying out, etc. Once cells loosely cooperation that starts providing more specialization. Cells that have thicker cell walls, or better offense/defense, or more expensive pathways for breaking down more complex chemicals, etc. Seems like the natural tendency would be towards more complexity heading towards where you have cells that specialize being outside (and help control PH and water) vs inside (that specialize in other things taking advantage of the ideal conditions). Keep in mind how many single cell organisms you can have in a single drop, how many drops are in the ocean, and how long a billion years is. Even a small competitive advantage turns into exponential growth for the community of cells. The noise of random mutations is going to eventually lead to a cooperation between cells that's going to cause a feedback loop. Cell -> multi cellular seems easy and obvious compared to no cells -> cells.
bad_user 8y ago
It took single celled organism 1 billion years to happen on Earth, it then took another 2 billion years for the first multi-celled animal. The jumps you're describing aren't easy at all. And there's no such thing as evolution towards intelligence. Evolution does not favor certain traits and at this point the most successful organisms on Earth are bacteria and the most successful multi-cellular animals are the insects. And actually intelligence requires big brains, which requires energy and thus fuel, so in constrained environments it can be a trait that's detrimental for survival. Even if multi-cellular life developed on other planets, to go from that to fairly intelligent dinosaurs or mammals is still very unlikely. Obviously, the problem with extrapolating what happened on Earth is that we've got a sample of 1.
- leoreeves 8y ago
  One could also argue that plants are the most successful because they have the largest biomass. Diagram here: http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2018/05/15/1711842115/F1.large.jpg?width=800&height=600&carousel=1 http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2018/05/15/1711842115...
- fdej 8y ago
  It's possible that evolution inherently drives life towards intelligence (as a likely outcome, not in the teleological sense). Three counter-points: * Sure, an extreme minority of organisms are intelligent right now, but considering that intelligence is such a recent invention, we can't assume that this is the terminal state of affairs. Indeed, intelligence is making progress in taking over the biosphere that shows no signs of slowing down. Perhaps thousands or millions of years from now, we will have converted all biomass to sustain our own civilization and perhaps (artificial?) life entirely devoted to intelligence will be dominant. * "Evolution towards intelligence" can be a "thing" even if this only occurs to a small minority of species. This is not to say that evolution is a linear progression from primitive to intelligent life; rather, if evolution makes life expand like a tree, and the degree of variation and complexity afforded by this tree is sufficiently large, it could be likely that some of the branches eventually reach intelligence (among myriads of other possible adaptations). This would be sufficient for intelligence to arise with high probability. * Life is inherently concerned with representing and processing useful information about the environment. The chemical feedback loops that probably made up proto-life would have implicitly encoded information about their chemical environment (and the fundamental chemistry of life still echoes this information). Eventually the incorporation of more complex feedback loops combined with evolution led to the development of complex biomolecules, proper replicators, genetic code, multicellular organisms, nervous systems, brains, the mammalian neocortex, and whatever adaptations enabled human-level intelligence. What we see is a gradual progression through great many improvements towards more sophisticated information processing. It's plausible that a similar progression in information processing complexity occurs with high probability whenever life evolves, although the concrete steps could be radically different. Yes, it took billions of years on earth, but the universe has billions of years to spare and it's massively parallel. Again, there doesn't have to be a linear progression towards intelligence for all life; the conditions just have to be favorable for intelligence to occur as a particular adaptive niche in sufficiently complex ecosystems. Of course, we can't really say much since we don't know what the actual probabilities given that we only have a sample size of n=1 for life and realistic experiments or simulations are far beyond our current capacity.
BjoernKW 8y ago
The question is: What could they possibly be using instead of some sort of electromagnetic signals? There are only a limited number of fundamental forces in the known universe (unless our current understanding of physics is completely wrong), not all of which lend themselves to being used for long-range communication. Gravity possibly could be used as a means of communication but I suppose it’d be rather slow and have a low bandwidth. Some sort of quantum entanglement-based form of communication might be possible though that contradicts our current understanding of how information can be transmitted in the universe. So, barring some fundamental shortcut such as Star Trek subspace, there aren’t too many options for interstellar communication.
- millstone 8y ago
  The fundamental forces are a starting point, but it's not right to assign special significance to EM. The great majority of mass in the universe does not feel electromagnetism. It's dark matter. Humanity's expertise in electromagnetism is driven by our biologically EM-sensitive eyes, our physical size, the energy levels that permit classical chemistry, and the timeframe in which we live our lives. Perhaps aliens exist with much larger physical forms, communicating with neutrinos over vast distances and larger time scales. Humanity would be completely blind to these signals.
  - gus_massa 8y ago
    EM is much easier, any moron wit a HAM radio can broadcast to the whole Earth, and a similar upgraded version that is still small and cheap can be used for interplanetary communication. So I'd guess EM for usual communications, but the idea of something weird like neutrinos for special purposes is nice. I don't know the size of the current neutrino transmitter/receivers, but IIRC the size is about a big building. Even the initial EM device where smaller. About dark matter, the current understanding is that it is diffuse and there are no "dark star" or "dark planets", but I always prefer to wait 10-50 (100?) years to call it definitive.
- colechristensen 8y ago
  Why not expect new physics we simply don't have the tools to see yet? Maybe something that only shows itself at very high energy or interacts only with neutrinos or antimatter or some exotic matter that isn't produced with fusion or supernovas. What about beings that operate at very different time scales? What if there is some encoding scheme that blows our information theory out of the water so communication just looks like white noise? What if evolution converges to a single shared consciousness or fierce independence and communication just stops being interesting after a certain stage? Or if non-interference is the very well enforced law of our corner of the galaxy? I think it's hubris to think that we know the answers to all of the questions for physics or at least we know what we don't know. My assumption is that there are questions/problems/phenomena that we don't even have the context yet to imagine.
yosito 8y ago
Maybe the chance of life starting isn't so rare. It could be fairly common when a planet with organic matter cools and develops a magnetic field.
naravara 8y ago
>Putting this altogether, it seems there's an excellent chance that primitive uni-cellular life evolves pretty readily and multi-cellular animals tend towards increased intelligence soon there after. How much intelligence though? Dinosaurs were around for eons and, as far as we know, never used simple machines or mastered the use of fire. So far, the human branch is the only handful of species that ever has. Even fairly closely related primates haven't figured it out despite the fact that they watch us do it all the time.
- sixo 8y ago
  Dinosaurs feel so much like a local maximum of evolution. Heavy investment in one "component" - exploitation over exploration.

kungtotte 8y ago

Two other factors that play a big role in not detecting life in the universe is: 1) it's a really big place. It's likely we can't see that far yet. 2) Will we be here a million years from now? Two million? Other civilizations could have come and gone dozens of times in our galaxy alone before we were here. And dozens may come and go after we're gone.

craftyguy 8y ago
#1 is a lot crazier, and more like: "we can only look at specific places, our detectors can only detect things which degrade as distance increases, and we might not be listening at the right frequency. So even if there were a civilization in this tiny, tiny region of the universe we are looking at, if they are too far away/obscured by debris/gas clouds, using wavelengths we aren't actively monitoring, we don't see them.
- ntsplnkv2 8y ago
  Okay that explains why we can't see them. Why can't they see us? All the arguments for life say "the universe is so big there has to be more life, and highly advanced civilizations somewhere." Assuming that, sure, we can't see them. But why hasn't some advanced civilization seen us?
  - craftyguy 8y ago
    Some thoughts (in no particular order): - some have, and have responded, but we aren't looking for them in the right place and in the right way - humans have only been able to actively send information into space since only about the 1950s (radio waves), and physics dictates that locations 80 light years away are just now starting to see that, provided they are looking in the right location and in the right way (and that they are technologically advanced enough to do so. - It could be that a sufficiently advanced civilization no longer has the capability to receive and transmit long-wave radio communications. Just like many computers now don't have any way to read a floppy disk, or if someone were trying to communicate via smoke signals, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who could understand it. - Space is so large that if a civilization several hundred light years away (an insignificant fraction of the size of our one galaxy, actually) sent us a message that we received and responded to, it's possible they could have collapsed by the time they receive our response. The converse is also true, they could have 'seen' us and sent a message, and we could collapse before we had a chance to receive it and respond.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - LeftTurnSignal 8y ago
    I always thought that if a civilization was so advanced, why would it spend time interacting with a world like ours? We may feel special, but that's only because we haven't found anything else. If they found hundreds (or more) of worlds like ours, then maybe we're just another dot on their galaxy map. Plus if the media is anything to go by, all we do is shoot each other. Might not be too exciting for a civilization who can travel amongst the stars.
woogiewonka 8y ago
Milky Way is estimated to be what... 13.5 billion years old. Humanity is 200,000 years old. The time span in which we are actually able to detect anything outside our own planet is what.. 100 years old? I suspect it's a lot more than a dozen times. If life is more likely to develop, then humans have only been able to look out into our own galaxy for an entire 0.00000074% existence of our galaxy. Now, let's say a civilization does not last more than 1 million years for whatever reason, that means we exist for a whopping 0.00074% age of the universe to date. I don't know if I did my math all wrong, but if correct there is an enormous chance that 2 civilzation's paths may never cross. We could be living right next to the remains of a civilization before us and never know it.

tannerwj 8y ago

"There is a next to infinitesimal chance that life started very quickly by some kind of once in billions of years magical circumstance." Tautology? There is a very small chance that something with a very small chance of happening happened...

inimino 8y ago
The intended meaning was that there's a small chance of something unlikely happening quickly. If it happened "quickly" (in geologic time) once conditions were favorable, that is evidence against it being enormously unlikely once those conditions obtained.

WalterBright 8y ago

It took a very long time to go from single cell to multi-cell, implying it is unlikely.

cristianpascu 8y ago
A billion years is a very long time if you wait in a railway station. But in milliseconds, for instance, as powers of 10 is a blink of an eye compared to the magnitude of the search space of configurations of a single protein.
- MrQuincle 8y ago
  The context here is the lifetime of the universe. If that is 13 billion years, 1 billion is a considerable chunk. If I interpret you right, you state that we might be extremely lucky hitting on a valid configuration so fast. In other words, the distribution might be at average at e.g. 1000 billion years. What shape would the distribution have?

oldcynic 8y ago

Meh. Much more likely they, and we, don't make it past planetary overpopulation, climate change or any of the numerous other self-made catastrophes.

gremlinsinc 8y ago
Even asteroids, super nova's, cosmic radiation, bigger but dumber predators (Dinosaurs), etc.. lots of external factors could destroy a planet too, a planet is a fragile place, and keeping life on it is a fragile balance, it's a miracle we've lasted so long, imho.
- wool_gather 8y ago
  None of these things is likely to actually be the end of life altogether, just life as it's known at the time. More asteroids won't make the Earth completely uninhabitable (just as it didn't the first time); nor will climate change (just as it hasn't before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event). They'll simply be the end of our current human civilization, along with plenty of other current species. Other forms of life may benefit tremendously; things will evolve to take advantage of the new circumstances.
  - annabellish 8y ago
    Those things probably won't escape the atmosphere, however. It would be much harder to bootstrap an energy-hungry civilisation any time within the next few billion years, as we've used most of the easily-accessible sources of fossil fuels. If human civilisation falls, whatever comes afterwards probably wouldn't be able to build a rocket, unless they wait for fossil fuels to regenerate.
    - wool_gather 8y ago
      Very true; the next global, technological civilization here would probably take tens of millions of years, if it happened at all.

ricree 8y ago

Multicellular life seems to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks. Life appeared very soon after it was possible, but a pretty huge chunk of the time since was limited to single cells.

sliken 8y ago
Why? Once the earth is covered by single cell organisms there's going to be an incentive for even the simplest of cooperation. Quorum sensing can help reproduction, survival, collecting food, surviving drying out, etc. Once cells loosely cooperation that starts providing more specialization. Cells that have thicker cell walls, or better offense/defense, or more expensive pathways for breaking down more complex chemicals, etc. Seems like the natural tendency would be towards more complexity heading towards where you have cells that specialize being outside (and help control PH and water) vs inside (that specialize in other things taking advantage of the ideal conditions). Keep in mind how many single cell organisms you can have in a single drop, how many drops are in the ocean, and how long a billion years is. Even a small competitive advantage turns into exponential growth for the community of cells. The noise of random mutations is going to eventually lead to a cooperation between cells that's going to cause a feedback loop. Cell -> multi cellular seems easy and obvious compared to no cells -> cells.

bad_user 8y ago

It took single celled organism 1 billion years to happen on Earth, it then took another 2 billion years for the first multi-celled animal. The jumps you're describing aren't easy at all. And there's no such thing as evolution towards intelligence. Evolution does not favor certain traits and at this point the most successful organisms on Earth are bacteria and the most successful multi-cellular animals are the insects. And actually intelligence requires big brains, which requires energy and thus fuel, so in constrained environments it can be a trait that's detrimental for survival. Even if multi-cellular life developed on other planets, to go from that to fairly intelligent dinosaurs or mammals is still very unlikely. Obviously, the problem with extrapolating what happened on Earth is that we've got a sample of 1.

leoreeves 8y ago
One could also argue that plants are the most successful because they have the largest biomass. Diagram here: http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2018/05/15/1711842115/F1.large.jpg?width=800&height=600&carousel=1 http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2018/05/15/1711842115...
fdej 8y ago
It's possible that evolution inherently drives life towards intelligence (as a likely outcome, not in the teleological sense). Three counter-points: * Sure, an extreme minority of organisms are intelligent right now, but considering that intelligence is such a recent invention, we can't assume that this is the terminal state of affairs. Indeed, intelligence is making progress in taking over the biosphere that shows no signs of slowing down. Perhaps thousands or millions of years from now, we will have converted all biomass to sustain our own civilization and perhaps (artificial?) life entirely devoted to intelligence will be dominant. * "Evolution towards intelligence" can be a "thing" even if this only occurs to a small minority of species. This is not to say that evolution is a linear progression from primitive to intelligent life; rather, if evolution makes life expand like a tree, and the degree of variation and complexity afforded by this tree is sufficiently large, it could be likely that some of the branches eventually reach intelligence (among myriads of other possible adaptations). This would be sufficient for intelligence to arise with high probability. * Life is inherently concerned with representing and processing useful information about the environment. The chemical feedback loops that probably made up proto-life would have implicitly encoded information about their chemical environment (and the fundamental chemistry of life still echoes this information). Eventually the incorporation of more complex feedback loops combined with evolution led to the development of complex biomolecules, proper replicators, genetic code, multicellular organisms, nervous systems, brains, the mammalian neocortex, and whatever adaptations enabled human-level intelligence. What we see is a gradual progression through great many improvements towards more sophisticated information processing. It's plausible that a similar progression in information processing complexity occurs with high probability whenever life evolves, although the concrete steps could be radically different. Yes, it took billions of years on earth, but the universe has billions of years to spare and it's massively parallel. Again, there doesn't have to be a linear progression towards intelligence for all life; the conditions just have to be favorable for intelligence to occur as a particular adaptive niche in sufficiently complex ecosystems. Of course, we can't really say much since we don't know what the actual probabilities given that we only have a sample size of n=1 for life and realistic experiments or simulations are far beyond our current capacity.

BjoernKW 8y ago

The question is: What could they possibly be using instead of some sort of electromagnetic signals? There are only a limited number of fundamental forces in the known universe (unless our current understanding of physics is completely wrong), not all of which lend themselves to being used for long-range communication. Gravity possibly could be used as a means of communication but I suppose it’d be rather slow and have a low bandwidth. Some sort of quantum entanglement-based form of communication might be possible though that contradicts our current understanding of how information can be transmitted in the universe. So, barring some fundamental shortcut such as Star Trek subspace, there aren’t too many options for interstellar communication.

millstone 8y ago
The fundamental forces are a starting point, but it's not right to assign special significance to EM. The great majority of mass in the universe does not feel electromagnetism. It's dark matter. Humanity's expertise in electromagnetism is driven by our biologically EM-sensitive eyes, our physical size, the energy levels that permit classical chemistry, and the timeframe in which we live our lives. Perhaps aliens exist with much larger physical forms, communicating with neutrinos over vast distances and larger time scales. Humanity would be completely blind to these signals.
- gus_massa 8y ago
  EM is much easier, any moron wit a HAM radio can broadcast to the whole Earth, and a similar upgraded version that is still small and cheap can be used for interplanetary communication. So I'd guess EM for usual communications, but the idea of something weird like neutrinos for special purposes is nice. I don't know the size of the current neutrino transmitter/receivers, but IIRC the size is about a big building. Even the initial EM device where smaller. About dark matter, the current understanding is that it is diffuse and there are no "dark star" or "dark planets", but I always prefer to wait 10-50 (100?) years to call it definitive.
colechristensen 8y ago
Why not expect new physics we simply don't have the tools to see yet? Maybe something that only shows itself at very high energy or interacts only with neutrinos or antimatter or some exotic matter that isn't produced with fusion or supernovas. What about beings that operate at very different time scales? What if there is some encoding scheme that blows our information theory out of the water so communication just looks like white noise? What if evolution converges to a single shared consciousness or fierce independence and communication just stops being interesting after a certain stage? Or if non-interference is the very well enforced law of our corner of the galaxy? I think it's hubris to think that we know the answers to all of the questions for physics or at least we know what we don't know. My assumption is that there are questions/problems/phenomena that we don't even have the context yet to imagine.

yosito 8y ago

Maybe the chance of life starting isn't so rare. It could be fairly common when a planet with organic matter cools and develops a magnetic field.

naravara 8y ago

>Putting this altogether, it seems there's an excellent chance that primitive uni-cellular life evolves pretty readily and multi-cellular animals tend towards increased intelligence soon there after. How much intelligence though? Dinosaurs were around for eons and, as far as we know, never used simple machines or mastered the use of fire. So far, the human branch is the only handful of species that ever has. Even fairly closely related primates haven't figured it out despite the fact that they watch us do it all the time.

sixo 8y ago
Dinosaurs feel so much like a local maximum of evolution. Heavy investment in one "component" - exploitation over exploration.