15 ms·
The timing of evolutionary transitions suggests intelligent life is rare
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- DOsinga 5y agoThis does feel like there's some selection bias here. The assumption is that intelligence hasn't developed before humans. If a planet wide civilization would have sprung up say with the dinosaurs, would we have gotten a shot? It seems somewhat plausible that such a civilization would either have survived ruling any subsequent rise out or have blown up the planet in a way that none would arise either.
- sillysaurusx 5y agoThe only answer to such questions is "there's no way to know." Which implies that selection bias is the best we can do. Ultimately, we're here. And we may only be here because we genocided all the other proto-human races (at least four of them). But no one likes talking about that, since it seems much more... personal... than a meteor. Was it intelligent to slay the neighbors? Maybe. But it was a comparatively rare event, since once it was done, it couldn't be done again. The interesting thing is that there's no way to know how many events like that have happened throughout all of history. We have very little data compared to the entire timeline. So any kind of measurement of "If this, then that" is very hard, and I have serious respect for the careful work that scientists manage to do in spite of the limitations.
- nefitty 5y agoBy the time I was done with school, subgroup dominance was shared among jocks and punk kids. Previously, it seemed that jocks were the most admired. After my time in school, the shift towards "weird and smart" kept increasing, to the point that bullying is now anathema and kids seem much freer to express their non-normie views. I think this is a micro example of a tendency for people to value raw physical power over mental faculties, and how it eventually shifts as the environment changes. On earth and elsewhere, there may be species that evolved to dominate through power, snuffing out those with the potential for dominating through intelligence. I agree, this might be one of those filters that are hard to surpass. For example, by sheer luck, dinosaurs were wiped out leaving room for mammals to take over the planet. Could dinosaurs have evolved to discover computation? On an intraspecies level, we breached a similar filter when we began organizing into agricultural/specializing societies. Those societies were started as a way for the physically powerful to harness lower-status humans. The consequence was the emergence of information-societies where intelligence is more valuable than physical power.
- Vetch 5y ago> Could dinosaurs have evolved to discover computation? At least judged by brain-case, (predatory) theropods would have been on the upper-end of dinosaur intelligence. Therefore we have that birds/avian dinosaurs are descendants of possibly the most intelligent branch of dinosaurs. Birds had as much time as mammals to evolve a candidate for human level general intelligence but never did. The most intelligent dinosaurs† that have ever evolved seem to be Parrots, Crows, Ravens and their close relatives. Though bird brains (IMO) are better designed, able to keep up with higher primates using fewer more densely packed lower energy neurons, they do not match later homininans in generality. ----------- †The Silurian hypothesis essentially observes it would be extremely difficult for definitive evidence of a past advanced civilization to persist for longer than 10^6 to 10^7 years. It also notes that it's more difficult than one would naively assume to rule out the possibility of an advanced civ based on the geological record. It's unlikely to be correct however. I went into more detail in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514626.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- oneoff786 5y agoA planet wide civ would be pretty difficult. I don’t think the earth would have enough Coal or oil to allow for easy energy access.
- SEJeff 5y agoIf only there were abundant sources of energy around like maybe nuclear fusion from a giant orange ball in the sky? Or perhaps hydro electric from the plethora of oceans? It wouldn't be easy, but it would be possible to create enormous amounts of energy from the normal daily cycle of the waves if it became necessary. There are plenty of ways to create energy given the abundance of resources on this planet, even before homo sapiens.
- oneoff786 5y ago> It wouldn't be easy, It would be multiple orders of magnitude more difficult, and for all practical purposes impossible. You’re drastically underestimating civilization’s historic reliance on coal. Also, fwiw you don’t get hydro electric power from the ocean. Hydro power is from water falling. Tidal power is a thing but it’s not easily achieved.
- wyattpeak 5y agoCivilisation started heavily relying on coal a few hundred years ago. The Earth was well-dominated by humans by then. It very probably would have taken a lot longer to get to where we are now, but I don't think there was any danger of seventeenth century civilisation falling to dust because there was no coal to be found.
- oneoff786 5y agoThere were plenty of dangers. One such threat could be the reliance on charcoal (burning trees) for high heat tasks like smelting metals. If you don’t have coal you’re gonna have a tough time making something like steel in an economically viable fashion. You will, in time, run out of trees to burn. And no, comparisons to modern day don’t count. You need to discount our ability to import tree biomass from other areas against the dependence on fossil fuels that enable that cheap transportation of goods.
- Waterluvian 5y agoI’m not sure this is what you meant, but onto a tangent: I feel like us humans have deeply romanticized dinosaurs as these incredibly dangerous, vicious, aggressive creatures. And I’m just not sure there’s any evidence to support that. If we unearthed bear skeletons a million years from now, we’d think that humans couldn’t cohabitate with bears. Such size. Those teeth. The claws! But bears generally steer clear of humans. Perhaps dinosaurs would too. Of course I barely know what I’m talking about. But it has me quite curious.
- hprotagonist 5y ago"we can't prove they weren't huge fatbirds!" https://imgur.com/gallery/rmad4 https://imgur.com/gallery/rmad4
- rembicilious 5y agoI find that equally terrifying. I’ve seen firsthand what happens to a frog when it hops into a coop of 7 chickens
- causi 5y agoI hate this recent trend of shitting on paleoartists as if they have no idea what they're doing. Many species of dinosaurs had feathers. Thus far there's no evidence T. Rex did. If it did, they wouldn't be a huge coat like that due to thermal consequences.
- zuminator 5y agoAt the very least we had no particular reason to assume dinos had the canonical stone colored skin with no markings.
- roenxi 5y agoIt seems a bit optimistic to say that humans are willing to cohabitate with bears. If there are bears in a human population centre they will be exterminated. Ignoring a different climate humans probably could have existed at the same time as dinosaurs. We would also have all-but wiped out anything larger than us by now though.
- eevilspock 5y agoIntelligence evolving before humans doesn't refute or contradict anything about this article unless it evolved independently on a different branch from humans.
- nkrisc 5y agoThere were some very large mammalian predators around during the time of our early ancestors, and even around today, though not quite as large. And yet here we are. Perhaps if humans had arisen in the time of the dinosaurs they’d have hunted them to extinction or destroyed their habitats.
- zw123456 5y agoMaybe there were multiple intelligent civilizations before humans, then the Great Filter Theory kicks in and they wipe themselves out with Global warming or whatever. I have a pet theory (just a fantasy really) that Dolphins were once land mammals with an advanced civilization but then they too heated the planet up until all the ice melted and they had to adapt and evolve to be sea mammals.
- Smoosh 5y agoThis seems like an appropriate time to recommend the book West of Eden [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_of_Eden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_of_Eden]. It posits an earth where humans and dinosaurs co-exist, but the dinosaurs, having been around longer, are the dominant species.
- Flankk 5y agoNice work of science fiction. It is impossible to estimate the probability of these events with a sample size of one. It likely took billions of years for our planet to reach the right temperature and composition for life to form. It's probable that life readily forms given the right conditions. In my opinion, it makes more sense that it is rare for a planet to develop the right conditions for life. That doesn't really matter much given there are 700 quintillion planets in our universe.
- mod 5y ago> It's probable that life readily forms given the right conditions Is this true? It is it also impossible to know? We haven't been able to reproduce it, so is your argument that we just haven't gotten the conditions correct?
- phkahler 5y agoAn argument for life being expected is made pretty well in the book "At Home in the Universe" by Stuart Kaufman (spelling?). We the expected.
- SEJeff 5y agoStatistically speaking, if it happened on our planet, it can (and likely has or will) happen elsewhere. Given that there are approximately 700 quintillion planets in the observable universe, it seems sensible to expect it to be mathematically possible and even likely that it has also developed elsehwere. For all we know, there were space fairing civilizations in or around Alpha Centauri. Maybe they were killed in a cataclysmic event a billion years before earth was formed?
- Vetch 5y agoIt's certainly possible but you've also chained a very specific series of events to explain an observation. Such scenarios are most hygienically reasoned about using a Bayesian quantification and updating of uncertainty. There's a lot we don't know but from what we do know and the observations we've made, life is likely to be extremely rare.
- api 5y agoSomething like this strikes me as the most likely Fermi paradox explanation. We will probably eventually find other life, but it will almost always be bacteria to at most multicellular life on the order of Cambrian era fossils. If intelligence occurs at a rate less than say once per galaxy per billion years, we may never meet ETI. Might find lots of bugs though. Intergalactic travel is many orders of magnitude harder than interstellar travel. The time frames are insane even close to light speed. Over millions of years things fall apart at the molecular level. Building anything that could last that long, even dormant, would be far beyond any technology we can foresee.
- cft 5y agoEven if a galaxy is 10 million light-years away, you can get to it in 1 month of proper (spaceship) time, if you travel fast enough. This is time dilation due to special relativity.
- nefitty 5y agoIf this is true you just lit a candle in my internal temple of hope lol
- cft 5y agoIn the Earth time, the spaceship would take a bit longer than 10m years to reach it, however. Plus the energy required to reach such velocity would probably be more than mass of the Earth if we were to annihilate it.
- ant6n 5y agoWell, accelerating a 100 ton spaceship to 0.99c (assuming some sort of beamed propulsion) requires only 2000 Terawattyears [1]. Of course, to turn 1e6 years into 1 year relative time, one needs like 0.99999999c, one needs 2 million Terawatt years [2], which is a much bigger energy investment, but still not on the order of annihilating the planet. Breaking is gonna be a bitch tho. [1] 100000 kg * (0.99 * c)^2 / sqrt(1-.99^2) in Terawatt Years [2] 100000 kg * ( 0.99999999 * c)^2 / sqrt(1-0.99999999^2) in Terawatt Years
- DyslexicAtheist 5y agoprobably not rare, but the combination of having opposable thumbs and being able to collaborate is unique. crows, dolphins and magpies are intelligent, so are apes, dogs, cats, and even insects. the question is if we're smart enough to recognize that intelligence. we perceive animals as more intelligent if we can can find a way to interact with them. measuring intelligence is in itself a non-intelligent thing to do
- newsbinator 5y agoWe perceive animals as intelligent if they’re good at interacting in complex ways with their environment to get what they want, in novel situations. Like if you were to trap a human in an alien maze with some food in it and a viable way to get it, the human would improvise rather than starve, demonstrating intelligence. One could argue stoically accepting fate and not playing the alien’s game is also intelligent (like in Star Trek). But we work with what we have.
- type0 5y agoKoalas have two opposable thumbs, in a parallel universe just imagine how the civilization would be build by them. They would need to be much more social and have a bunch more time over than just sitting there digesting food. We freed so much of our time and metabolic needs just by cooking meals - it's insane. What I'm getting at, there's so many factors that we never even consider.
- igorkraw 5y agoOr we might get Ob'enn (I heavily recommend the attached comic universe) https://schlockmercenary.fandom.com/wiki/Ob%27enn https://schlockmercenary.fandom.com/wiki/Ob%27enn
- buzzin__ 5y agoIf you find a german tank with a serial number 200, your best guess of the total number of tanks they have is 400. With the same logic, we can guess that civilizations that discover nuclear power live around 150 years.
- ordu 5y agoI believe, that logic should be different. When you consider tank, you assume that some random process of sampling took one tank out of all tanks that existed from start to end. The reasoning assume that you might get any tank, with a serial number 1 or 500 or whatever. Any existed number. When you look at civilisation with nuclear power, then sampling process had no chances to took civilisation existed for 120 years. Even if civilisation could live for 120 years. It is a different process of data generation, so the reasoning must be different.
- 0xGod 5y agoIt exists only where God allows it to exist. Some intelligent life forms are separated from the rest by vast stretches of space and time, others are not. Each one has a special reason for existing.
- ausbah 5y agocare to explain more? "because my preferred choice of suoernstjentity says so" hasn't held up well as a scientific argument
- robwwilliams 5y agoThe most fun idea in this article is a tacit proposal to look really hard for signs of advanced technologies in and around red dwarfs because they have had the potential to support an oxygen-rich biosphere for at least 10x longer that earth: roughly 8 billion years versus 800 million years.
- dvh 5y agoAll red dwarfs are flare stars, with solar winds 10 times stronger, they heat less so planets must be closer which makes it even worse.
- Symmetry 5y agoYeah. One danger for life is the star cooking it. But the other is that the solar wind will tend to strip away a planets hydrogen if life doesn't develop photosynthesis to give the planet an ozone layer fast enough. It took life on Earth most of a billion years[1] fooling around with chemosynthesis before photosynthesis took off. It's a hard step and life around a red dwarf would be on a much more stringent timeframe than life on our planet was. [1]http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-drake-equation-again.html http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-drake-eq...
- Ostrogodsky 5y agoFor me intelligent life should be from somewhat to very common across the universe. Simplistically you would need: A source of energy, aka a star, at the very least there are 10^22 of them A rocky planet situated in the habitability zone of the star (and this is lacking the imagination for life in other kind of environments).These guys are common. The creation of chemical self-replication with a stable set of compounds (The hardest part for me, but far from impossible) The appearance of intelligence as an evolutionary trait (nature loves that explore/exploit game) Time We modern humans lived 99.7% of our 200k year history entirely unaware there were other people and land a mere "earth radius" away, we may as well repeat that story in a cosmic scale.
- ravi-delia 5y agoThe problem is really that we spent 99.7% of our history extremely close to the surface of an extremely large sphere. Space is somewhat less lacking in, like, physical obstacles. I mean really, a priori, if there were loads and loads of intelligent species in our galaxy, wouldn't you expect to see them? Why bother positing a brand new set of technologies that just by chance happens to thread whatever needles are necessary to avoid detection, and just figure "oh, guess for some reason there are fewer technological civilizations than I expected"? Obviously we aren't alone in the universe, but it takes some real gymnastics to justify nearby neighbors.
- guerrilla 5y ago> I mean really, a priori, if there were loads and loads of intelligent species in our galaxy, wouldn't you expect to see them? Not according to the Dark Forest theory. There are either quiet civilizations or dead civilizations due to realpolitik. This video summarizes the details[1] 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAUJYP8tnRE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAUJYP8tnRE
- GoblinSlayer 5y agoWe can't see Planet Nine right under our nose, why would we see anything beyond that?
- 5y ago
- nobrains 5y agoFrom the abstract: "The emergence of intelligent life late in Earth's lifetime is thought to be evidence for a handful of rare evolutionary transitions". --- How do we know it is late in the Earth's lifetime? What if this is early?
- brabel 5y agoWe know we're at the second half of Earth's life history because life has existed since the very beginning, at least 4 billion years, and it's widely believed that within 1 billion years from now, due to how the Sun will evolve, life will become utterly impossible [1]. Maybe the technology a highly evolved civilization can create could stop that, but given how things are going, that's extremely speculative. EDIT: correction: by 1 billion years from now, the oceans will be mostly gone and likely animal life will be impossible, but unicelular life will still be possible for another few billion years, according to the linked article... "By 2.8 billion years from now, the surface temperature of the Earth will have reached 422 K (149 °C; 300 °F), even at the poles. At this point, any remaining life will be extinguished due to extreme conditions.". Mind blowing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth#Loss_of_oceans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth#Loss_of_oceans
- _xnmw 5y agoAll of these discussions seem to hinge on the assumption that intelligence arises spontaneously from nature given the "right" conditions, but that is an unproven and statistically unlikely assumption [1]. Just as a random byte generator will statistically never output a full featured operating system within the age of the universe (and certainly nothing resembling elegant source code), so are any random chemical/biological/physical processes statistically unlikely to ever spontaneously lead to intelligent life within the age of the universe. Intelligence is created by intelligence, nothing else. Call it "God" or whatever you wish, but it doesn't arise out of randomness, unless the randomness is constrained into highly structured output, which requires intelligence to do. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
- rollo 5y agoSince it's everything but random, given the strong, strong selection pressure, what you wrote misses the point completely. And the argument based on that is completely meaningless as well.
- _xnmw 5y agoWhat creates that selection pressure?
- messe 5y ago"Your theory that the sun is the centre of the solar system, and the earth is a ball which rotates around it has a very convincing ring to it, Mr. James, but it's wrong. I've got a better theory," said the little old lady. "And what is that, madam?" inquired James politely. "That we live on a crust of earth which is on the back of a giant turtle." Not wishing to demolish this absurd little theory by bringing to bear the masses of scientific evidence he had at his command, James decided to gently dissuade his opponent by making her see some of the inadequacies of her position. "If your theory is correct, madam," he asked, "what does this turtle stand on?" "You're a very clever man, Mr. James, and that's a very good question," replied the little old lady, "but I have an answer to it. And it's this: The first turtle stands on the back of a second, far larger, turtle, who stands directly under him." "But what does this second turtle stand on?" persisted James patiently. To this, the little old lady crowed triumphantly, "It's no use, Mr. James—it's turtles all the way down." — J. R. Ross, Constraints on Variables in Syntax, 1967
- dividedbyzero 5y agoDon't a bunch of squids, birds, other primates, etc. show plenty of intelligence? Yet none show any ambition to develop high tech that anyone could spot from space, chimps don't even feel the need to communicate all that much even though they're totally capable of using sign language when properly incentivized, they just don't seem to have the urge to express themselves like we do. Might that not imply that intelligence is pretty frequent, but that what we're looking for isn't intelligence per se, but a bunch of other very specific qualities and factors that channel intelligence to express itself in high tech spacefaring ways? Seeing how much had to fall into place just so in the last 100 000 years so we could put someone on the moon, I guess that seems plausible?
- wruza 5y agoYet none show any ambition to develop high tech that anyone could spot from space Above the sea level, anyone who had it is either a part of “our” genome or extinct. Below it is a completely separate biome which may not yet had an event starting this type of evolution. It’s unclear if in a million years (in the absence of humans) squids would stay the same or evolve into walking and then moon-landing. I think that only one species can do that, because the most energetic natural environment (free oxygen in our case), which is required for it, is usually only one per planet, and you have to fight over it, with hands, wood, metals, fire, ATGMs.
- guerrilla 5y ago> Above the sea level, anyone who had it is either a part of “our” genome or extinct. That's too vague to argue with but I'll do it anyway: No, elephants and crows as just two examples.
- wruza 5y agoI mean one can spot an elephant from space, but a crow? :) I was talking in a high-tech context, of course there are pretty intelligent species besides us, but they don’t build lit up megastructures.
- empressplay 5y agoRare at scale is not rare.
- jrowen 5y agoI love stuff like this, in the past I spent a good amount of time wondering about what were the key milestones in the development of intelligent life. Multicellularity is a good example. From my (admittedly outsider) perspective, a lot of that seems lost on the popular approaches to AI, which seem to focus too heavily on the late-stage result (the brain) and not everything that led up to it. Evolutionary algorithms have been out of vogue for some time, Artifical Life is an under-explored backwater. One thing that I am surprised has been left out of this analysis is extinction events. In the intro it seems to dismiss “models that appeal to rare chance events” (paraphrasing). But the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction in particular was a chance event that had an absolutely massive...impact...on the evolution of intelligence. Dinosaurs dominated for a couple hundred million years with no signs of moving toward primate-style intelligence, and then suddenly a whole new set of conditions created an environment where scavenger mammals developed rapidly.
- 317070 5y agoIf you replace "intelligence" with "flying", it becomes more apparent why there is generally little interest in artificial life as an approach to develop artificial intelligence (although there are small conferences on this approach). In general, to recreate something from nature, so far we have not needed to recreate nature as a whole. It is not clear why we need to treat intelligence any differently.
- jrowen 5y agoFor one, flying is a relatively simple physical phenomenon, and once we had a firm grasp on the principles of lift, we were able to design our own solutions. Intelligence is, in comparison, an incredibly complex phenomenon that seems a lot harder to separate from the inner workings of the biology and evolutionary history. It feels to me like there is an implicit hubris embodied in the industry and reflected in your comment. Obviously there has been an increasing overlap between neuroscience and AI, and the approaches do strive to understand and mimic the biological structure of the brain. What is not clear to me is how we have largely collectively decided that we don’t need to incorporate understanding of how that structure came to be. And I’m not saying that we need to replicate the whole process exactly as nature did it. That would take billions of years. But perhaps if we understood it better we could take the key insights and mechanisms to design our own system. Intelligence is more than just processing information. A big part of intelligence is agency, it’s having a reason for doing things because you live in a world where you have intrinsic goals and desires and feelings and needs. I just don’t see AlphaGo or Watson or anything like that ever reaching that level. They’re Frankenstein vat processors built to answer questions within predetermined contexts we bake into them. They’ll never question why they do what they do or simply decide to do something else. I’m convinced we need to essentially create a simulation where something with agency can develop on its own in order to reach truly interesting AGI.
- nathias 5y agoThere are a countless rare transitions that we don't yet even recognize as important, each of them compounds the rarity of technologically advanced intelligent sapient sentient life.
- therealbilly 5y agoYeah I think our level of intelligence is probably pretty rare. I mean we have a G type star which are not that plentiful in the cosmos. We have a large moon that causes tidal forces on earth and mixes things up. We apparently have a nice selection of elements in our solar system. The problem is that humans took a very long time to evolve. Now we only have .8 billion years to enjoy things before the sun cooks the planet.
- machiaweliczny 5y agoI think we have much less, before someone fucks up.