5 ms·

Why do people always assume that aliens would be smarter than us?

jswhitten 13y ago
Because the timescale of the universe is much longer than the timescale of human civilization or intelligence. The odds of any aliens we meet being at the exact same level of development as humans (to within ten thousand years or so) despite having evolved independently on a planet billions of years old, are extremely small. In the vast majority of cases they will be millions of years more advanced or millions of years less. As chimps don't build starships, it follows that almost every interstellar civilization we find will be godlike compared to us. In other words, we are a newborn intelligent species, and newborns generally find that everyone around them is older.
- mtdewcmu 13y ago
  You're assuming that being older implies having more capabilities. Civilizations like ours almost certainly reach limits, either in terms of resource limits, or in terms of fundamental limits on the kinds of things that can be engineered (or both). The fact we've never run into any alien tourists or explorers, despite thousands of years of record keeping and being able to search the earth for alien artifacts, and our own research into star travel support the idea that it's impossible.
NhanH 13y ago
Not all aliens, but generally we're only concerned with aliens that could potentially affect us. Since we can't travel that far away from our planet right now (and we know that there seems to be no life capable planet nearby - with a loose definition of "nearby"), any alien that we can meet right now would have to be quite a bit more advanced to us.
- mtdewcmu 13y ago
  The aliens haven't found us. I think the best hope of contact is if we develop interstellar travel first and go looking for them. I think the premise of the paper depends on mankind possessing this technology.
Houshalter 13y ago
They would likely be millions of years ahead of us. It's very unlikely two intelligent species would happen to evolve within a few thousand years of each other. So either natural evolution, or more likely self-modification, would have had tons of time to improve. Not to mention artificial intelligence. They could be millions or billions of times more intelligent than us. And imagine a mind the size of the Earth, or the size of Jupiter, with the energy of their entire star.
- mtdewcmu 13y ago
  There's reason to think that we're maxed out on intelligence. Our heads are about as big as could fit through the birth canal. A brain as big as a planet couldn't possibly work, and if it had the energy of a star, it would be made of plasma at millions of degrees Kelvin.
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    We are actually only on the cusp of intelligence. The very first things to emerge from evolution capable of building a technological civilization. If it were possible for chimpanzee brains to build a technological civilization, we would be having this conversation at an even lower level of intelligence. The brain was designed by evolution, a very stupid and slow process. We are the result of iteratively improving what worked good at controlling locomotion in fish. Certainly we can make improvements, certainly we can do better. The fact that the human brain is limited to fitting through the birth canal is a great example. With c-sections that isn't particularly relevant, and computers/AI aren't limited in size or energy requirements at all (or at least not anywhere near the same constraints that humans have.) So imagine if brains that constraint was removed and you made brains dozens, hundreds, or even millions of times larger. You could build a computer the size of a planet, though it would require a ridiculous amount of technological ability. The energy of a star doesn't mean literally as hot as a star, but something like thousands of solar panels to efficiently collect as much of the energy as possible for powering the enormous computer. It was just an example of what the limits of technology might be.
    - 13y ago
visakanv 13y ago
We can assume that it's incredibly, incredibly unlikely that they'd be equally intelligent, willing and able to have meaningful conversations with us. Aliens being less intelligent than us is a less interesting and threatening idea than aliens being MORE intelligent than us- so we tend to focus on the latter scenario.
alan_cx 13y ago
Because we are.

Because the timescale of the universe is much longer than the timescale of human civilization or intelligence. The odds of any aliens we meet being at the exact same level of development as humans (to within ten thousand years or so) despite having evolved independently on a planet billions of years old, are extremely small. In the vast majority of cases they will be millions of years more advanced or millions of years less. As chimps don't build starships, it follows that almost every interstellar civilization we find will be godlike compared to us. In other words, we are a newborn intelligent species, and newborns generally find that everyone around them is older.

mtdewcmu 13y ago
You're assuming that being older implies having more capabilities. Civilizations like ours almost certainly reach limits, either in terms of resource limits, or in terms of fundamental limits on the kinds of things that can be engineered (or both). The fact we've never run into any alien tourists or explorers, despite thousands of years of record keeping and being able to search the earth for alien artifacts, and our own research into star travel support the idea that it's impossible.

NhanH 13y ago

Not all aliens, but generally we're only concerned with aliens that could potentially affect us. Since we can't travel that far away from our planet right now (and we know that there seems to be no life capable planet nearby - with a loose definition of "nearby"), any alien that we can meet right now would have to be quite a bit more advanced to us.

mtdewcmu 13y ago
The aliens haven't found us. I think the best hope of contact is if we develop interstellar travel first and go looking for them. I think the premise of the paper depends on mankind possessing this technology.

Houshalter 13y ago

They would likely be millions of years ahead of us. It's very unlikely two intelligent species would happen to evolve within a few thousand years of each other. So either natural evolution, or more likely self-modification, would have had tons of time to improve. Not to mention artificial intelligence. They could be millions or billions of times more intelligent than us. And imagine a mind the size of the Earth, or the size of Jupiter, with the energy of their entire star.

mtdewcmu 13y ago
There's reason to think that we're maxed out on intelligence. Our heads are about as big as could fit through the birth canal. A brain as big as a planet couldn't possibly work, and if it had the energy of a star, it would be made of plasma at millions of degrees Kelvin.
- Houshalter 13y ago
  We are actually only on the cusp of intelligence. The very first things to emerge from evolution capable of building a technological civilization. If it were possible for chimpanzee brains to build a technological civilization, we would be having this conversation at an even lower level of intelligence. The brain was designed by evolution, a very stupid and slow process. We are the result of iteratively improving what worked good at controlling locomotion in fish. Certainly we can make improvements, certainly we can do better. The fact that the human brain is limited to fitting through the birth canal is a great example. With c-sections that isn't particularly relevant, and computers/AI aren't limited in size or energy requirements at all (or at least not anywhere near the same constraints that humans have.) So imagine if brains that constraint was removed and you made brains dozens, hundreds, or even millions of times larger. You could build a computer the size of a planet, though it would require a ridiculous amount of technological ability. The energy of a star doesn't mean literally as hot as a star, but something like thousands of solar panels to efficiently collect as much of the energy as possible for powering the enormous computer. It was just an example of what the limits of technology might be.
  - 13y ago

visakanv 13y ago

We can assume that it's incredibly, incredibly unlikely that they'd be equally intelligent, willing and able to have meaningful conversations with us. Aliens being less intelligent than us is a less interesting and threatening idea than aliens being MORE intelligent than us- so we tend to focus on the latter scenario.

alan_cx 13y ago

Because we are.