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But that’s only one scenario, and this hypothesis assumes a natural progression to evolutionary processes, and thus the development of intelligent life. Evolut
by nis0s 1y ago
But that’s only one scenario, and this hypothesis assumes a natural progression to evolutionary processes, and thus the development of intelligent life.
Evolution is entirely random, and you really just need one mutant to survive and propagate enough to create a line from its original mutation. If that mutation, or collection of such effects, results in greater than human intelligence at any point in time, then there’s no reason to assume that other intelligent life is similar to us, and as such “stuck” right now.
If there is intelligent life that developed enough to hack resource-efficient interstellar travel which doesn’t kill them and has found Earth and exists in the same universal time span as us, then it’s likely they’re either studying us (via infiltration), or avoiding this planet altogether.
- JohnFen 1y ago> Evolution is entirely random Evolution is not entirely random. A lot of things go into it, some of which are random mutations, and some of which are not. But even if every change was a random mutation, natural selection is still in play and forms a non-random forcing function.
- nis0s 1y agoThere’s no inherent optimal state for a set of genes under natural selection. Natural selection produces cumulative effects which play on each other, but there’s no goal or intention in this process. Is it more likely for some processes to be favored? Maybe, depends on the set of genes and environmental conditions, but there are always epigenetic factors which will introduce differences, which makes evolutionary development more a random process than a stochastic one.