3 ms·

> The thing is that even for a super low probability event, the size of the universe is so huge and such events must be happening all the time. But numbers can

> The thing is that even for a super low probability event, the size of the universe is so huge and such events must be happening all the time. But numbers can go arbitrarily low.

echelon 1y ago
And you have to have multiple low probability events. These probabilities multiply. We had a good start. A Jupiter to clear the debris, a Theia impact to create tides and contribute to tectonics, a magnetic core, a shielded atmosphere. We had water delivered to us. Maybe even panspermia. Maybe cell walls and mitochondria are hard. Maybe multicellular is hard. Maybe life on land is hard. Building lungs, rebuilding eyes, having actual energetic gasses on land... Maybe life is easy, but intelligence is hard. Maybe civilization is hard. Maybe technology development can only happen on dry land, because aqueous chemistry is hard in water. Sorry mollusks and cetaceans: you'll probably never be able to do chemistry or materials science. Maybe you need water and carbon and other chemistries aren't robust enough. Maybe you need lots of fossil fuel deposits to develop industry. And that requires growth without bacteria and decomposers for millions of years, implying a certain order to evolution. Maybe you need a certain sized gravity well to escape. Maybe surviving the great filter is hard and still ahead of us. Maybe every species can build tech where a kid in their garage can extinct the entire species by 3d printing grey goo. There's just so much we don't know about how life could happen. Let alone intelligent life. We don't even know where we're headed.
- leoedin 1y ago
  Even on Earth, the only reason humans exist is because the “local maximum” of the dinosaurs was wiped out by a meteor. Perhaps comparably intelligent dinosaurs would have eventually evolved - but it’s not a given!
  - TuringTest 1y ago
    It took several environment-changing events to get our unique kind of intelligence; mammals had to thrive in place of saurs; and then, Africa needed to be split by the Rift and to create the dry savannah. This forced some apes to climb down the trees and depend on a diet of scavenging for meat, which happened to both increase brain size AND require improved intellect to survive, forcing the evolution of our hypertrophied symbolic brain. Had this not happened however, other intelligent species could have filled the niche. There's no shortage of other intelligent species in our planet, not just other mammals but octopus and some birds. And then you get hive intelligence, which could equally be forced to evolve into a high problem-solving organism.
  - Qem 1y ago
    Maybe they didn't produce an intelligent species just because they had not the luck of living in the unprecended time in the history of Earth with both high atmospheric O2 and very low atmospheric CO2 we enjoyed for a while, before we started to burn fossil fuels by the gigaton. See https://www.qeios.com/read/IKNUZU https://www.qeios.com/read/IKNUZU
  - 3eb7988a1663 1y ago
    Dinosaurs existed for some 200 million years with no detectable signs of technology development[0]. Presumably, the steady state did not produce a scenario in which the intelligence niche would develop without some other less catastrophic global change event. [0] Unless that episode of Voyager was right on the mark https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Distant_Origin_(episode) https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Distant_Origin_(episode...
  - HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
    Intelligence evolved at least three times on earth - dinosaurs (leading to corvids, but a raptors already intelligent), mammals and cephalopods (e.g. octopus). I suspect that any evolutionary environment will eventually create enough variety and instability that some generalists emerge, creating a reward for intelligence. The rise in intelligence from early water-bound life to later forms was likely all driven by more complex and diverse environments.
- macintux 1y ago
  My pessimistic side says that the conditions for intelligent life are so implausible that we’re unique, and when we drain the planet dry of easily-accessible fossil fuels we’ve deprived any successor civilization of its opportunity to escape the planet. Basically I fear we’re the universe’s only shot of appreciating and populating the galaxy (or beyond) and we’re on the brink of throwing that away.
  - Qem 1y ago
    > ...when we drain the planet dry of easily-accessible fossil fuels we’ve deprived any successor civilization of its opportunity to escape the planet. On the flip side, that could also be plausibly a blessing, avoiding them to fall into the same trap of becoming too powerful before they get wise. These comics illustrate it: https://www.badspacecomics.com/post/grounded https://www.badspacecomics.com/post/grounded
  - HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
    As long as we have air and water (i.e. as long as we're alive), then we can make propellants such as Methane or Liquid Hydrogen and LOX, Hydrazine & Dinitrogen Tetroxide (or Hydrogen Peroxide).
    - macintux 1y ago
      None of which are, I assume, as easy/efficient/effective to integrate into a new civilization's tech tree as coal & oil.
      - HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
        What has that got to do with energy dense rocket fuels for getting to orbit ?!
        macintux 1y ago
        The key phrase was "successor civilization".
- GWBullshit 1y ago
  You're not wrong, but you're in the wrong place to talk to people about low-probability events and how they multiply. Most Hacker News can't into elementary-school-level probability equations and will instead take the ostrich approach; there was some behavioral scientist dude from Cambridge Analytica who wrote about this and the TL;DR is that most "adults" have infantile minds that prefer various safety blanket mechanisms that society is more than ready to offer them just to do anything to have an excuse to not face the truth of what basic math reveals to more likely than not be true.
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
  > Maybe life is easy, but intelligence is hard Intelligence has evolved three times independently on earth - dinosaurs/birds (raptors, covids), mammals, and cephalopods (Octopus) > Maybe you need water and carbon Maybe so, but Oxygen and Carbon are only behind (albeit far behind) Hydrogen and Helium as the most abundant elements in the universe
mr_toad 1y ago
> But numbers can go arbitrarily low. Which begs the question, why 1, and not zero? I can buy zero, or a very large number. But 1 exactly? Nature doesn’t do that.
- soVeryTired 1y ago
  Siméon Denis Poisson would like a word with you. But in seriousness, I agree.
- tshaddox 1y ago
  There’s not a huge difference between zero and one, other than whether someone’s around to comment about it on HN. And even a second wouldn’t really tell us more about the probabilities.

> The thing is that even for a super low probability event, the size of the universe is so huge and such events must be happening all the time. But numbers can go arbitrarily low.

echelon 1y ago

And you have to have multiple low probability events. These probabilities multiply. We had a good start. A Jupiter to clear the debris, a Theia impact to create tides and contribute to tectonics, a magnetic core, a shielded atmosphere. We had water delivered to us. Maybe even panspermia. Maybe cell walls and mitochondria are hard. Maybe multicellular is hard. Maybe life on land is hard. Building lungs, rebuilding eyes, having actual energetic gasses on land... Maybe life is easy, but intelligence is hard. Maybe civilization is hard. Maybe technology development can only happen on dry land, because aqueous chemistry is hard in water. Sorry mollusks and cetaceans: you'll probably never be able to do chemistry or materials science. Maybe you need water and carbon and other chemistries aren't robust enough. Maybe you need lots of fossil fuel deposits to develop industry. And that requires growth without bacteria and decomposers for millions of years, implying a certain order to evolution. Maybe you need a certain sized gravity well to escape. Maybe surviving the great filter is hard and still ahead of us. Maybe every species can build tech where a kid in their garage can extinct the entire species by 3d printing grey goo. There's just so much we don't know about how life could happen. Let alone intelligent life. We don't even know where we're headed.

leoedin 1y ago
Even on Earth, the only reason humans exist is because the “local maximum” of the dinosaurs was wiped out by a meteor. Perhaps comparably intelligent dinosaurs would have eventually evolved - but it’s not a given!
- TuringTest 1y ago
  It took several environment-changing events to get our unique kind of intelligence; mammals had to thrive in place of saurs; and then, Africa needed to be split by the Rift and to create the dry savannah. This forced some apes to climb down the trees and depend on a diet of scavenging for meat, which happened to both increase brain size AND require improved intellect to survive, forcing the evolution of our hypertrophied symbolic brain. Had this not happened however, other intelligent species could have filled the niche. There's no shortage of other intelligent species in our planet, not just other mammals but octopus and some birds. And then you get hive intelligence, which could equally be forced to evolve into a high problem-solving organism.
- Qem 1y ago
  Maybe they didn't produce an intelligent species just because they had not the luck of living in the unprecended time in the history of Earth with both high atmospheric O2 and very low atmospheric CO2 we enjoyed for a while, before we started to burn fossil fuels by the gigaton. See https://www.qeios.com/read/IKNUZU https://www.qeios.com/read/IKNUZU
- 3eb7988a1663 1y ago
  Dinosaurs existed for some 200 million years with no detectable signs of technology development[0]. Presumably, the steady state did not produce a scenario in which the intelligence niche would develop without some other less catastrophic global change event. [0] Unless that episode of Voyager was right on the mark https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Distant_Origin_(episode) https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Distant_Origin_(episode...
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
  Intelligence evolved at least three times on earth - dinosaurs (leading to corvids, but a raptors already intelligent), mammals and cephalopods (e.g. octopus). I suspect that any evolutionary environment will eventually create enough variety and instability that some generalists emerge, creating a reward for intelligence. The rise in intelligence from early water-bound life to later forms was likely all driven by more complex and diverse environments.
macintux 1y ago
My pessimistic side says that the conditions for intelligent life are so implausible that we’re unique, and when we drain the planet dry of easily-accessible fossil fuels we’ve deprived any successor civilization of its opportunity to escape the planet. Basically I fear we’re the universe’s only shot of appreciating and populating the galaxy (or beyond) and we’re on the brink of throwing that away.
- Qem 1y ago
  > ...when we drain the planet dry of easily-accessible fossil fuels we’ve deprived any successor civilization of its opportunity to escape the planet. On the flip side, that could also be plausibly a blessing, avoiding them to fall into the same trap of becoming too powerful before they get wise. These comics illustrate it: https://www.badspacecomics.com/post/grounded https://www.badspacecomics.com/post/grounded
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
  As long as we have air and water (i.e. as long as we're alive), then we can make propellants such as Methane or Liquid Hydrogen and LOX, Hydrazine & Dinitrogen Tetroxide (or Hydrogen Peroxide).
  - macintux 1y ago
    None of which are, I assume, as easy/efficient/effective to integrate into a new civilization's tech tree as coal & oil.
    - HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
      What has that got to do with energy dense rocket fuels for getting to orbit ?!
      - macintux 1y ago
        The key phrase was "successor civilization".
GWBullshit 1y ago
You're not wrong, but you're in the wrong place to talk to people about low-probability events and how they multiply. Most Hacker News can't into elementary-school-level probability equations and will instead take the ostrich approach; there was some behavioral scientist dude from Cambridge Analytica who wrote about this and the TL;DR is that most "adults" have infantile minds that prefer various safety blanket mechanisms that society is more than ready to offer them just to do anything to have an excuse to not face the truth of what basic math reveals to more likely than not be true.
HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
> Maybe life is easy, but intelligence is hard Intelligence has evolved three times independently on earth - dinosaurs/birds (raptors, covids), mammals, and cephalopods (Octopus) > Maybe you need water and carbon Maybe so, but Oxygen and Carbon are only behind (albeit far behind) Hydrogen and Helium as the most abundant elements in the universe

mr_toad 1y ago

> But numbers can go arbitrarily low. Which begs the question, why 1, and not zero? I can buy zero, or a very large number. But 1 exactly? Nature doesn’t do that.

soVeryTired 1y ago
Siméon Denis Poisson would like a word with you. But in seriousness, I agree.
tshaddox 1y ago
There’s not a huge difference between zero and one, other than whether someone’s around to comment about it on HN. And even a second wouldn’t really tell us more about the probabilities.