{"id":2129,"date":"2008-04-16T16:08:53","date_gmt":"2008-04-16T16:08:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/gregladen\/2008\/04\/16\/is-there-intelligent-life-else\/"},"modified":"2018-05-02T14:03:15","modified_gmt":"2018-05-02T19:03:15","slug":"is-there-intelligent-life-else","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/16\/is-there-intelligent-life-else\/","title":{"rendered":"Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Several thousand intelligent beings have surrounded two funny looking blue trees. On some planet. Elsewhere. [Image source]<\/a><\/em> <\/span>Back in the old days, when Carl Sagan was alive and at Harvard, there was an annual (or at least frequent) debate between Sagan and my adviser, Irv DeVore. The debate was about the possibility of intelligent life having evolved on other planets.You already know Sagan’s argument: There are billions and billions of Galaxies, each with billions and billions of stars, so there are billions and billions and billions and billions of stars. Even if the probability of planets forming around a star is low, and of an earth like planet being one of them, and being at the right distance from the star, etc. etc. etc. there are still going to be a very large number of worlds amenable to the origin of life, and some of those, the evolution of complex life, and some of those will give rise to intelligent life, and some of them will ask the same question we are asking now and seek to explore the possibility of life on other planets.Then, I guess we get together in a coffee shop on Alpha Centauri and talk about it.DeVore’s argument went the opposite way. He devalued the probability of intelligent life forming on any given planet by going through all the moments in the long evolutionary history of humans (starting with the origin of life) and pointing out each of the numerous moments in geological time when something went “wrong” and nearly wiped out this particular lineage (and a bunch of other lineages as well). This arguement was done with only limited knowledge of the numerous mass extinctions that we are now aware of, and it was still pretty convincing The probability of intelligent life was very very low anywhere.I’m pretty sure both arguments are convincing, and as has been pointed out, the fact that we have only one test case (the Earth) from which to infer probabilities means that many of the key probabilities are simply made up, and not empirically or even deductively derived.Well, now, Andrew Watson of the University of East Anglia proposes an improved model to consider the chance of intelligent life arising somewhere. One of the major differences between this and earlier models is that we now are starting to believe that there are more planets circling the various stars than previously guessed. Perhaps planets are fairly routine. However, Watson actually estimates the chance of intelligent life forming on other planets as being fairly low because of the necessary evolutionary steps life must, according to him, go through to get intelligent creatures. The probability of each of these transitions … including the origin of unicellular life, multicellular life, specialized cellular structures (organs and such), and human language … is very small, and the amount of time for this to happen in is also very small.You can read a summary of Watson’s argument here at Astrobio.<\/a>My take on the little I’ve read of Watson’s article is that he’s got a lot of it wrong. There seems to be two different and possibly largely independent things going on in evolution. One is the maintenance of the status quo, which results form stabilizing selection and niche filling, and the other is dramatically quick novelty.For instance, it looks like unicellular life formed very quickly after it was environmentally possible. this is still a guess, but it is not the case that a lifeless but potentially life-supporting earth hung around for billions, or even many hundreds of millions, of years waiting for the right lightning bolt to hit the right mud puddle (that’s a metaphor of course …it may have been deep sea floor vents, whatever). No, it seems to have happened right away.For instance, the shift from there only being single celled life to there being differentiated multi celled forms was very very quick. It is not the case that unicellular life formed colonial life forms that kept almost evolving into jelly fish but never quite did until that one lucky conjuncture of events.For a very long time something (many things?) kept change from happening, then suddenly change happened.(When I say suddenly, I’m speaking in geological terms. This does NOT mean that I think things happened over thousands or millions of years and it looks sudden. It does not mean that I think things were sudden like a century or a year or a month. What it means is that we don’t know, but it was not a billion years. “Quick in geological time” does not mean “slow” it means “crappy resolution, the phenomenon we are observing happened in one temporal unit of our observational framework.”)Well, one basic question one might ask is this: Would life on all planets have these two features? It is possible that the change-making and the stabilizing sets of forces may have a different configuration on on other planets. So, some planets may require several tens of billions of years more than those planets will even exist to have even a few evolutionary things happen, while on other planets, evolutionary change may happen 100 orders of magnitude faster than on Earth. Is Earth slow, fast, or average?Another sort of assumption that is usually made in these models is that life elsewhere would “look” like life on earth. That there would be photosynthesizing plants and heterotorphic animals. Balderdash, I say! The particular configuration of life we have on Earth is in part, possibly large part, a product of the strange and quirky history that this particular planet has undergone. Why not photosynthesizing motile things with neural structures, or highly “intelligent” non-motile organisms anchored to the sea floor near hydrothermal vents?Speaking of neurons, this is my favorite wrench to throw into the works. Neurons. They suck. A given neuron can contain, pretty much, one piece of data, and can have only one output (which can be split to a number of different receiving cells, but they need to be kind of near each other). Neurons only communicate in one direction.Neurons evolved to transmit a small amount of information in one direction at a time in simple organisms that did not have brains.If by chance Neurons had numerous organelles that could each contain lots of data, and could duplicate these organelles before cell division, and\/or if what we usually think of as neural information could be coded in a molecule for transport and reproduction (i.e., like storing neural data in a DNA like molecule) and so on and so forth, the structure of information acquisition and use could potentially be very different than it is on Earth.On Earth, intelligence is expensive. Neurons are inefficient and picky, and each organism has to reconstruct its system of managing information fresh from birth. Neural tissue is expensive to operate. In other words, there are all sorts of selective forces working AGAINST intelligence.This is an idea totally lost on most people, even those who are busy being smart asses about the chance of life on other planets. It is NOT the case that there is overwhelming selection FOR intelligence (meaning whatever you think it means, we need not get bogged down here in defining intelligence). No, intelligence is selected for, and it is selected against, but mostly, it is selected against.The concept that intelligence is wonderful and is therefore selected for is a teleological misunderstanding of evolution.But, on some other planet, intelligence might be cheap and generally useful. On some other planet, intelligence could be widespread among whatever sort of freaky alien organisms have evolved there. Watson’s key step … “human language” could be utterly mundane and embarrassingly simplistic and useless by the standards of some other life systems.But this range of possible life systems is usually not considered very important in these models. Human intelligence is often a considered typical, or average end product, just like one needs to consider other aspects of life on Earth average just to get a start on these calculations, for better or worse. But while we may be able to make the argument that replicating molecules (like DNA), photosynthesis or chemosynthesis, or certain other aspect of life may be likely to occur in many different life systems, mammals, brainy things, humans, these are all oddities of this planet and the usual way of getting any kind of memory-tracking, exploratory, “thinking” organ in an organism on earth is absolutely ridiculous.The only thing that I am prepared to assume is this: Somewhere in the Universe, there are intelligent entities that are way ‘smarter’ than humans, but still can’t get this right.<\/p>\n

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In homage to an inspiration of this post, I provide this link to the secret, generally unseen obituary of Professor Irven Boyd DeVore.<\/a> <\/strong><\/p>\n

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Several thousand intelligent beings have surrounded two funny looking blue trees. On some planet. Elsewhere. [Image source] Back in the old days, when Carl Sagan was alive and at Harvard, there was an annual (or at least frequent) debate between Sagan and my adviser, Irv DeVore. The debate was about the possibility of intelligent life … Continue reading Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[181,191],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5fhV1-yl","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2129"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2129"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29653,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2129\/revisions\/29653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}