4 ms·

Don'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 sp

Don'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 ago
Yet 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 ago
    I 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.
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      The comment you were responding to already has that as an assumption and is saying that they don't do those things not because they can't but because they don't have ambition to do them, so the fact that they don't isn't a measure of intelligence.
    - rusticpenn 5y ago
      Ants and termites build megastructures..
trevyn 5y ago
Intelligence without ambition puts a hard bound on future intelligence.
deepsun 5y ago
> chimps don't even feel the need to communicate all that much Because that wasn't providing any evolutionary benefit. Take a group of chimps, and make offspring of those who communicate more often to have a higher chance of survival, and voila -- they will develop an urge to communicate!
- tsol 5y ago
  Only possible issue-- it'll probably take a few million years
- lurquer 5y ago
  Sounds like a neat experiment. Perhaps it should be done. Of course, it’s so much easier to simply imagine such things. All that ‘scientific method’ stuff is just a nuisance when it comes to evolution.
jrowen 5y ago
That’s mostly a question of how one chooses to define “intelligence.” For the purposes of this type of discussion it’s usually equivalent to “whatever humans have that other animals don’t.” We’re looking for something that would be relatable to us, probably the minimum requirement would be the ability to communicate with them at the same level of robustness that we can with each other (edit: or a recognizable demonstration of mastery over the physical world to a level that meets or exceeds our own). It’s true that other terrestrial life forms possess some capabilities that we could call intelligence, but then we would just need to use another word that defines the special human je ne sais quoi.
- Symmetry 5y ago
  Probably the most relevant difference is humans forming prestige hierarchies alongside dominance hierarchies with larger brains able to store more of the resulting cultural accumulation being partially downstream of that. Knowledge transmission is always imperfect but if people try to learn from the guy reputed to be the best flint napper you can support a lot more technology than if everybody just learns from their parents. Learning from non-kin isn't unusual in the animal kingdom. Monkeys seeing other monkeys drop a mix of sand and grain in water to separate them and then copying that is a classic example. But deliberate teaching of non-kin and the way we use language to help with that teaching is pretty unique. An octopus might have smarts comparable to a feral human, but not to an acculturated human.
guerrilla 5y ago
Indeed, I think it's clear a lot of animals can do a lot of things that they just don't want to do and the reason they don't want to is because that just wasn't beneficial for them in their environment. Maybe cultures could be created and spread amongst them that might bring out that ambition though.
Retric 5y ago
You can see beaver dams from space, or atmospheric oxygen. Only sending radio signals is uniquely human. In terms of space, single called organisms have traveled further from earth than people have. So calling us spacefaring is kind of misleading in the context of alien life. I doubt we’re detectable outside of a 100 light year sphere from earth and none of those stars look like they contain any habitable planets. The only way to suggest alien intelligent life is meaningfully different than beavers in this context is to raise the bar far enough we don’t qualify.
- drsnow 5y ago
  >I doubt we’re detectable outside of a 100 light year sphere from earth and none of those stars look like they contain any habitable planets. Do you have a source for that?
  - cevn 5y ago
    His source is probably the amount of time we've been dabbling in radio comms. However if the aliens had a big telescope surely that radius would expand?
    - KineticLensman 5y ago
      > However if the aliens had a big telescope surely that radius would expand? I think a more interesting question is how far away could we detect a civilisation equivalent to our own, using our current technology. Otherwise you can assume aliens (or our future selves) with arbitrarily sensitive detection equipment limited only by whether or not the detectors are inside the speed-of-light radius of the emitting civilisation. IIRC our most powerful transmissions have been from NORAD radars looking for missiles coming over the north pole. In some ways we are now emitting less detectable signals, e.g. with lower power 5G cells and fibre broadband replacing good old radio.
  - Banana699 5y ago
    GP's reasoning is probably: the only plausible way to detect human civilization (and not just our planet, which is already hard enough from a different star) is by it's radio signature, and the oldest radio emissions is from 100 years ago, give or take. Anyone standing outside of a sphere whose center is earth and radius is 100 light year hadn't been reached by our oldest detectable-from-space civilization artifacts yet. It strikes me as a pretty intuitive arguemnt to make and true by default, to show it wrong you have to find or somehow plausibly argue for the existence of some physical medium or process that human civilization (or even earth life in general) emit or modulate in unique, detectable-from-space ways other than electromagnetic waves and that we have been doing this since before radio.
grishka 5y ago
There is clear line between human and animal intelligence, the language. It's this ability to exchange information about arbitrarily complex ideas, or, one might say, to exchange and store thoughts in a serialized form, that sets our intelligence apart and opens the possibilities for a civilization as advanced as ours. No other species on this planet has I/O capabilities this advanced.
ASalazarMX 5y ago
Humans also didn't show any ambition, besides keeping themselves and their little band alive, for hundreds of thousands of years. We know they had the mental capacity because hunting, foraging, cooking and tool-making needs knowledge and planning, but they were fine as they were. Somehow humans started cooperating in large groups, planting the seeds of civilization, outcompeting (or possibly exterminating) our less social brethren. We can't know if the first human capable of leading large groups was a genius or a psychopath, but without people like him/her humanity probably wouldn't be very ambitious.

wruza 5y ago

Yet 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 ago
  I 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.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    The comment you were responding to already has that as an assumption and is saying that they don't do those things not because they can't but because they don't have ambition to do them, so the fact that they don't isn't a measure of intelligence.
  - rusticpenn 5y ago
    Ants and termites build megastructures..

trevyn 5y ago

Intelligence without ambition puts a hard bound on future intelligence.

deepsun 5y ago

> chimps don't even feel the need to communicate all that much Because that wasn't providing any evolutionary benefit. Take a group of chimps, and make offspring of those who communicate more often to have a higher chance of survival, and voila -- they will develop an urge to communicate!

tsol 5y ago
Only possible issue-- it'll probably take a few million years
lurquer 5y ago
Sounds like a neat experiment. Perhaps it should be done. Of course, it’s so much easier to simply imagine such things. All that ‘scientific method’ stuff is just a nuisance when it comes to evolution.

jrowen 5y ago

That’s mostly a question of how one chooses to define “intelligence.” For the purposes of this type of discussion it’s usually equivalent to “whatever humans have that other animals don’t.” We’re looking for something that would be relatable to us, probably the minimum requirement would be the ability to communicate with them at the same level of robustness that we can with each other (edit: or a recognizable demonstration of mastery over the physical world to a level that meets or exceeds our own). It’s true that other terrestrial life forms possess some capabilities that we could call intelligence, but then we would just need to use another word that defines the special human je ne sais quoi.

Symmetry 5y ago
Probably the most relevant difference is humans forming prestige hierarchies alongside dominance hierarchies with larger brains able to store more of the resulting cultural accumulation being partially downstream of that. Knowledge transmission is always imperfect but if people try to learn from the guy reputed to be the best flint napper you can support a lot more technology than if everybody just learns from their parents. Learning from non-kin isn't unusual in the animal kingdom. Monkeys seeing other monkeys drop a mix of sand and grain in water to separate them and then copying that is a classic example. But deliberate teaching of non-kin and the way we use language to help with that teaching is pretty unique. An octopus might have smarts comparable to a feral human, but not to an acculturated human.

guerrilla 5y ago

Indeed, I think it's clear a lot of animals can do a lot of things that they just don't want to do and the reason they don't want to is because that just wasn't beneficial for them in their environment. Maybe cultures could be created and spread amongst them that might bring out that ambition though.

Retric 5y ago

You can see beaver dams from space, or atmospheric oxygen. Only sending radio signals is uniquely human. In terms of space, single called organisms have traveled further from earth than people have. So calling us spacefaring is kind of misleading in the context of alien life. I doubt we’re detectable outside of a 100 light year sphere from earth and none of those stars look like they contain any habitable planets. The only way to suggest alien intelligent life is meaningfully different than beavers in this context is to raise the bar far enough we don’t qualify.

drsnow 5y ago
>I doubt we’re detectable outside of a 100 light year sphere from earth and none of those stars look like they contain any habitable planets. Do you have a source for that?
- cevn 5y ago
  His source is probably the amount of time we've been dabbling in radio comms. However if the aliens had a big telescope surely that radius would expand?
  - KineticLensman 5y ago
    > However if the aliens had a big telescope surely that radius would expand? I think a more interesting question is how far away could we detect a civilisation equivalent to our own, using our current technology. Otherwise you can assume aliens (or our future selves) with arbitrarily sensitive detection equipment limited only by whether or not the detectors are inside the speed-of-light radius of the emitting civilisation. IIRC our most powerful transmissions have been from NORAD radars looking for missiles coming over the north pole. In some ways we are now emitting less detectable signals, e.g. with lower power 5G cells and fibre broadband replacing good old radio.
- Banana699 5y ago
  GP's reasoning is probably: the only plausible way to detect human civilization (and not just our planet, which is already hard enough from a different star) is by it's radio signature, and the oldest radio emissions is from 100 years ago, give or take. Anyone standing outside of a sphere whose center is earth and radius is 100 light year hadn't been reached by our oldest detectable-from-space civilization artifacts yet. It strikes me as a pretty intuitive arguemnt to make and true by default, to show it wrong you have to find or somehow plausibly argue for the existence of some physical medium or process that human civilization (or even earth life in general) emit or modulate in unique, detectable-from-space ways other than electromagnetic waves and that we have been doing this since before radio.

grishka 5y ago

There is clear line between human and animal intelligence, the language. It's this ability to exchange information about arbitrarily complex ideas, or, one might say, to exchange and store thoughts in a serialized form, that sets our intelligence apart and opens the possibilities for a civilization as advanced as ours. No other species on this planet has I/O capabilities this advanced.

ASalazarMX 5y ago

Humans also didn't show any ambition, besides keeping themselves and their little band alive, for hundreds of thousands of years. We know they had the mental capacity because hunting, foraging, cooking and tool-making needs knowledge and planning, but they were fine as they were. Somehow humans started cooperating in large groups, planting the seeds of civilization, outcompeting (or possibly exterminating) our less social brethren. We can't know if the first human capable of leading large groups was a genius or a psychopath, but without people like him/her humanity probably wouldn't be very ambitious.