Comments on: Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe?

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 17:49:06 +0000

Nimonnet: Yes, it does take time, and as far as I can tell, there is a certain amount of disagreement on how much time, or what the timing of key early events was.

By: NMONNET

NMONNET — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 16:49:02 +0000

“The Universe is about 14 billion years old, stars started forming right at the beginning of that time, and then produced the various elements. So all the elements were in place really near the beginning of that.”Are you sure about that? The abundance on a planet of heavy elements needed to sustain life requires that they be created in a supernova, and then that a new star be formed. That takes some time, doesn’t it?

By: Jim Thomerson

Jim Thomerson — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:41:56 +0000

Life as we know it is based on the unique properties of the C atom and H2O. There is no other atom which has the “life-giving” (hate that term!) properties of C. There is also no other compound which has the unique properties of water. So I find it hard to picture life which is not C and H2O based. I leave this to others who know more about the subject than I do.If there are advanced beings in the universe, who understand physics as we don’t know it, and are thus capable of interstellar travel on a practical basis, I hope the evolution toward angels is right. If so, and they are aware of us, they are leaving us strictly alone. They are waiting for us to come to them. The history of contact between more and less technologically advanced human populations clearly demonstrates that such contact is not a good thing for the less technologically advanced group.

By: elbogz

elbogz — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11:50:19 +0000

Perhaps intelligence is not a good thing from an evolutionary point of view. I think there are many examples of why this wouldn’t be desirable trait in a species in terms of survival. We can have a nice saber-tooth tiger sandwich, but at what cost? Nightmares and delusions and superstitions and the ability to destroy the earth with the things we create? Things like evil aren’t scientific in nature, they are bad trait of intelligence. The fish in the ocean aren’t threatened by destruction from evil fish, in the same way we all live on the brink of destruction by an evil intelligent person with their finger on the button.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11:23:25 +0000

A lot of interesting comments are developing here, but I’m only going to address one now: That of “intelligence” being selected for/selected against.Please not that I never said that intelligence is not selected for. Or if I did, I did not mean it. I did, say, however, that it is selected against. And this is true.There are no adaptations that lack a cost. The cost is what makes a particular adaptation selected against, the benefit is what makes it selected for. This is pretty basic.My main argument here is that neural structures are a) expensive and troublesome in a number of ways, and thus have costs. The benefits do not come without these costs; and b) the way neural systems happen to work on earth can be argued to be more costly than they have to be. This can be said of virtually any adaptation, of course. My argument, though, is that since neurons were initially shaped by selection under conditions where quantity and complexity was not a big issue, and that intelligence requires quantity, by chance, neurons as a way of processing and storing information in quantity and in complex systems may be especially costly.

By: Mark P

Mark P — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 10:27:28 +0000

Saying intelligence is not selected for is like saying locomotion is not selected for. If you define intelligence narrowly enough (or anthropocentrically enough), then it might be true, but it begs the question.

By: yogi-one

yogi-one — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 02:13:00 +0000

This is one of those discussions where you can speculate your ass off because the real benchmarks are unknown. Tailor-made for the internet. Speculative blabbing out the wazoo!I have read Michio Kaku’s idea on this and he refers to earlier works that tried to (speculatively, of course) rate a civilization by the level of energy it could harness.Is the civilization limited to fossil fuels? Can it harness the energy of the local planet? Can it harness the energy of a star? Can it harness the energy of a galaxy? These would be used as benchmarks for measuring the advancement of civilizations.He also makes the interesting analogy arguing that we could be surrounded by more advanced civilizations and not know it. The example is of an ant colony living near a freeway. The freeway users would not know (and most probably not care) there was an ant colony 50 yards from the freeway. The ants of course, know nothing about human society. But there they are, two societies living so close they could touch each other, each oblivious to the existence of the other.Another interesting thing to speculate on is that on earth at least, the evolutionary time scales have gotten smaller as the more intelligent animals have arisen. Single celled life and small multicellular organisms existed for hundreds of millions of years, so and on. Humans evolved in a very short period of time, and perhaps our particular form – Homo Sapiens – will not last more than a few million years at most before we evolve into something else.So that brings us the idea that it may take a long time for life to evolve to a certain level, but at a critical point, the timescales that it takes to evolve newer, more intelligent organisms starts shrinking exponentially.It might take 4 billion years to evolve the first form with a recognizable intelligent responses and some kind of multi-lobed brain.. But then things start happening much faster.Once an organism understands it’s genetic makeup, then theoretically it can start evolving itself, which would again shrink exponentially the time it takes to evolve the more intelligent life forms.What if, after 5 billion years, an organism that understands how to evolve organisms is arrived at? Theoretically, there would be at least 5 billion more years to tinker – on purpose – with evolving new, stronger, more adaptive, more intelligent lifeforms.At that point, if they could figure out how to survive the death of their local star, they would become a true interplanetary intelligent species.I think it’s not so improbable when you throw in this idea that the evolution happens faster and faster as you climb up the intelligence scale.Five billion years is a LOT of tinkering time for an intelligent species that knows how to manipulate genetics and how to harness various energy sources.No doubt if one of us ever got off our “anthill” and realized we were surrounded by superhighways, such beings could easily appear Godlike to our simple brains.

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 01:46:49 +0000

I wonder if there could be a platypus on another planet. Maybe a naked mole rat…I understand that people are interested in intelligence because they want companionship that they can’t find within there own community, planet, galaxy, whatever, but aren’t there more important questions regarding life on other planets?What is life on other planets likely to be like? Is it going to be carbon based, oxygen breathing, DNA coded? It seems to me that the primordial soup of another planet is probably much different than it was on earth. I suspect that if we find life on another planet it will be gold-based or maybe silver… something that we have to conquer and kill anyway, would the human race have it any other way?

By: Ritchie Annand

Ritchie Annand — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:51:30 +0000

I don't think the plant-like autotrophs and moving heterotrophs scenario would be particularly unique to Earth. Motility is liable to be somewhat expensive, so if you need not move to receive your energy, you are bound to be somewhat sessile, and that fits autotrophs to a T.I've been reading The Living Cosmos, and it's a pretty good tour of life on planets, life on this planet, etc.One thing I found pretty interesting was the discussion of what happened to Earth after photosynthesis started. Now, I don't know how accepted this particular interpretation (Snowball Earth) is, but they make a fairly compelling case that the production of oxygen from carbon dioxide caused a major temperature crash lasting until not all that long before the Cambrian, in geological terms.Heterotrophs returning carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere would have helped reverse that, making the Earth more habitable and opening the way for the Cambrian explosion.*grin* Your complaints about neurons are not totally founded :) They are not bit-holders! The inputs and outputs average 10,000, which is nonetheless a small portion of the other neurons in range.Sensory neurons are unidirectional, as are motor neurons, but other neural populations have inhibitory and excitatory neurons, and can feedback in loops. Feedback with a gain of 1.0 or more can produce pulses spontaneously once started. There is a constant but shifting background pattern and learning forms deviations, which also shift. You can smell vanilla, and the smell of vanilla a week later will be a totally different 2-D voltage pattern.One thing that it seemed they were finding out in the early 2000s was that there is no directed "lookup" stage - the brain does not, for example, take the olfactory input and compare it with a bank of learned scents - the learning "basins" in the pattern are enough to make the association.Yeah, that's a lot of jargon, but the source book (Mitchell's) is even thicker on the jargon :)I would agree that intelligence is by and large not selected for.One interesting SciAm article I remember reading was one about howler monkeys versus spider monkeys. Howler monkeys have an enlarged cecum (analogous to our appendix area, I believe), which is kept alkaline and ferments the leaves that the howler monkeys eat. Howler monkeys do not have particularly large brains.Spider monkeys, on the other hand, eat fruit, and they cannot ferment mature leaves like howlers can. When food supplies are low, they can survive off young leaves, and their digestive tracts respond to the fiber by moving things along faster (young leaves give up their scant nutrients fairly quickly, so moving things along allows more leaves to be eaten - it's an interesting possible take on the human reaction to fiber).In the forest, edible fruit-bearing trees are fairly few and far between. Spider monkeys can generally remember where the trees are when they find them, as well as remember how recently they visited and when the fruits are in season. Spider monkey brains are about double the size of those of howler monkeys. That gives one possible indication of the sorts of situation where intelligence is rewarded.Technology could very well be rare. We could also just be out of the loop communication-wise because electromagnetic communication might just suck compared to other alternatives that we have yet to discover. It could be somewhat like being on a desert island without a radio.Or we could just be alone in the universe!Ah, I miss Carl Sagan. Neil DeGrasse Tyson and other potential heirs to the "throne" are just lacking... something. I'm not sure what it is, but it's more than just saying "yumans" :)Anyhow, that's enough blether from me for now :)

By: Mark P

Mark P — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 23:39:14 +0000

As to intelligence, it really depends on how you define it. If you try to define it anthropocentrically, it is rare, since we’re the only example on Earth. But it you define it more broadly, as I think you should, intelligence is actually quite common on Earth. It is certainly common among the “higher” animals, including both mammals and birds. It is present at some level in virtually every living thing bigger than a bug. Of course they don’t all have spoken languages or use computers, but they have to process information and take actions, and that requires intelligence. There may be only one species of life on Earth that is intelligent enough to build space ships, but intelligence itself is pretty common here.