4 ms·
They’re correct that they are many measures by which humans are not exceptional. Quite a lot, actually. But there clearly is something different about humans, s
by nkrisc 1y ago
They’re correct that they are many measures by which humans are not exceptional. Quite a lot, actually. But there clearly is something different about humans, something exceptional. Is it language? Is it our capacity for thought? I think what it actually is that makes us different is absolutely up for debate, and even traits we thought were exclusive to humans may not be.
So I’m not sure we know exactly what it is that makes us different, but we clearly are in some way. There is no other animal that has developed anything close to the capabilities we have.
Would any other species on earth, in a billion years, ever develop the ability to travel to other celestial bodies, let alone even know what they are?
- account42 1y agoEven those other measures at which other animals excel are largely done better by humans once you include the use of technology.
- ForHackernews 1y ago> Would any other species on earth, in a billion years, ever develop the ability to travel to other celestial bodies, let alone even know what they are? A billion years is a very very long time. Humans and chimps diverged about 7-8 million years ago. Given no human competitors and a billion years there's no reason some other great apes or raccoons or something couldn't develop a space programme.
- nkrisc 1y agoLife has existed for billions of years before humans, why hasn’t it happened before us? Perhaps you’re right, and that’s equally interesting.
- Figs 1y agoHow do we know it hasn't? If some clever species of dinosaur ~100M years ago had a few thousand years of rapid progress like we've had -- before blowing themselves up... would we even be able to tell?
- Manuel_D 1y agoWe'd have been able to see, for example, ice cores showing chemical changes in the atmosphere from industrialization. You can't carry out the same kind of massive activity that humans did without leaving some evidence. Even the Black Death was observable in ice cores on account of fewer humans burning wood.
- lblume 1y agoHumanity has left many traces. An interesting example is a vast amount of chicken bones buried underground.
- chuckadams 1y agoNone of which are even close to even 100,000 years old, let alone a million or 100 million.
- Jensson 1y agoWe have stone tools from a few million years ago. Modern things are much larger and numerous so would be much easier to find and last longer. https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/human-evolution/2-6-million-year-old-stone-tools-reveal-ancient-human-relatives-were-forward-planning-600-000-years-earlier-than-thought https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/human-evolution/2-6-...
- nkrisc 1y agoWe don’t know it hasn’t, but we have no evidence it has.
- ForHackernews 1y agoThis is actually a somewhat active area of research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis The absence of detectable plutonium-244 (half-life of 81.3 million years) is one indication that we are ~probably the first civilization on Earth to discover nuclear fission.
- ForHackernews 1y agoOne billion years ago there were no animals or plants and only barely multicellular organisms: > And here’s another cool thing: a little over a billion years ago, life started experimenting with multicellularity. Imagine single cells deciding to team up and work together! A fossil discovered in Scotland, a tiny ball-shaped thing, is the oldest known example of a multicellular organism. https://geoscience.blog/was-there-life-1-billion-years-ago/ https://geoscience.blog/was-there-life-1-billion-years-ago/ I know OP was just kind of throwing out a big number but it's worth highlighting the orders of magnitude involved here. To put it in terms HN might grok more easily, if modern humans have existed for 300 kB we're talking about one gig.
- jbaber 1y agoIt's funny looking at the theropod (e.g. T. Rex) family tree compared to ours. Bipedal animals whose forelimbs shrink and jaws grow. No way they're making tools.
- xelxebar 1y agoCalling something as exceptional or special entails a value judgement; it's not particularly surprising, IMHO, for the things humans care about to align around human traits. Heck, even the act of making judgements about human exceptionalism is an arguably human-specific trait. Consider, horseshoe crabs are undeniably the best at doing all things horseshoe crab. No other animal comes close to behaving like a horseshoe crab! IMHO, the almost tautological nature of this judgement is what makes it uninteresting at best and actively harmful at worst. It's just a stone's throw away from individual, group, and racial exceptionalism.
- nkrisc 1y ago> Consider, horseshoe crabs are undeniably the best at doing all things horseshoe crab. No other animal comes close to behaving like a horseshoe crab! Yes, you could say this about any animal. It does not explain why, apparently, no other animal in the entire history of the Earth has done anything comparable to what humans have done. Horseshoe crabs are good at horseshoe crab things, but convergent evolution has in the past created similar animals that are roughly equally good at doing horseshoe crab things. There have been and are many animals good at doing horse-ish things. Many good at wolf-ish things. Even flight has evolved independently several times among both vertebrates and invertebrates (and while we can’t fly on our own, we regularly fly faster than any flying animal). We’re petty weak among all animals and yet the heaviest things that have been moved have been moved by humans. We’re pretty slow runners and yet we hold pretty much any speed record you can think of. Why hasn’t there been any other animals similar to humans in our abilities? Why hasn’t spaceflight evolved several times? Why hasn’t metallurgy? Particle physics? Why can’t any other animal understand the basic chemistry of the universe as we do?
- AlecSchueler 1y agoThere have been other animals with similar capacities, we just killed them all. Neanderthals couldn't develop any of the things you mentioned because humans stopped them. If we hadn't been here or if they had gained the upper hand during some pivotal moments then they might be wondering about their own exceptionalism today.
- squishington 1y agoKorzybski claimed that the most significant difference was the human ability of time-binding. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cbqr9NcFDtjvM6zC4/time-binding https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cbqr9NcFDtjvM6zC4/time-bindi...
- irickt 1y agoJacob Bronowski expressed this with a more fundamental hypothesis. Humans have "a sense of the future" whereas other animals have very limited foresight.
- grenbys 1y agoDon’t octopi take a coconut shell with them to cross a patch of sandy sea floor with no place to hide? Pretty advanced sense of future.
- troyvit 1y agoMurder. We're the best at murder.