Alien Intelligence

[Bullgrit]

[video=youtube;bhE7sgvwipo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhE7sgvwipo[/video]
In the above video, NdT brings up an interesting point for discussion.

Intelligence in the evolutionary record. Maybe our level of intelligence *is* a unique thing in the universe. Considering it doesn't seem evolutionarily necessary for wide and long survival, and it's only evolved for one species on our planet, ever. Maybe high intelligence is the total freak of the universe, and not just general existence of life. That is, maybe life is all over the place, but higher intelligence has not and will not evolve anywhere else because it's just not needed.

Bullgrit

 

[Alzrius]

Be careful, if you say the phrase "alien intelligence" three times, Kevin Siembieda appears!

 

[Kramodlog]

I think you meen Giorgio Tsoukalos.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

Kind of tough to tell from a sample size of one planet. Still consider that there are animals we consider capable of a certain level of cognition: whales, dolphins, squids, elephants. We're unique on the planet but not entirely alone. It doesn't take any great leap of imagination to think that one of them could evolve intelligence similar to ours.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Just saw a fascinating thing on avian intelligence. Turns out corvids & parrots rank up there with chimps, man, and precious few others on the chart of critters comparing the ratio of brain mass to body mass. All those above the line are capable of pretty impressive feats.

Do not be surprised if we meet intelligent alien life, and they want crackers.

 

[Ryujin]

I think you meen Giorgio Tsoukalos.

Oh God, the hair.

I have previously stated that we may eventually find out that intelligence was an evolutionary dead end. Actually the word I used was "mistake." At the risk of summoning said pie-in-the-sky Greek writer and von Daniken cohort, I'll use several "ifs" in series. If you assume that in the infinite universe life elsewhere is a given, and if you assume that it will take many different forms based on its nascent location, and if you further assume that intelligence has some survival value, then it becomes an almost certainty that intelligence has/will develop elsewhere.

Where I draw the line is the idea that if we aren't born of an alien life form, we have any realistic chance of encountering such in the short (in astronomical terms) existence of intelligent life on this planet.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Do not be surprised if we meet intelligent alien life, and they want crackers.[/QUOTE]

racist birds eating the white people

 

[Morrus]

Intelligence in the evolutionary record. Maybe our level of intelligence *is* a unique thing in the universe. Considering it doesn't seem evolutionarily necessary for wide and long survival, and it's only evolved for one species on our planet, ever. Maybe high intelligence is the total freak of the universe, and not just general existence of life. That is, maybe life is all over the place, but higher intelligence has not and will not evolve anywhere else because it's just not needed.

Lots of speculation, of course. Maybe the reason there's only one intelligent species on Earth is that on any given planet, one intelligent species wipes out the others. Neanderthals, for example, were intelligent. We're great at exterminating each other in the same species, let alone other intelligent species.

The odds just seem unlikely that we could be unique. 400 billion stars in our own galaxy alone, billions of galaxies. For us to be the only one, it'd be like winning the lottery every single day all your life. A billion times. Possible? Sure? Likely? Not at all.

 

[Umbran]

Intelligence in the evolutionary record. Maybe our level of intelligence *is* a unique thing in the universe.

I think we need to be *very* careful there, in suggesting that "our level" of intelligence is what we think it is. That is another assumption that we don't have a great basis for yet, as the only thing we have to analyze our intelligence is... our intelligence.

Among the birds, there are corvids (crows and ravens) who can do multi-level logic. The parrots have interesting linguistic abilities, and suffer from environmental sensory deprivation rather like we do - they are conjectured to have levels of mentation similar to a human 5-year old. There are similar thoughts about dolphin intelligence.

This means something *close* to us has come up at least four separate times on Earth. And it is terribly easy to think that some of the more inquisitive animals out there - say racoons, or bears, might come to similar points in the not-too-distant evolutionary future if we weren't mucking things up for them. This stars making it seem much less rare.

 

[tomBitonti]

We seem to get back to the more basic question of whether life (as we know it, or not far from it) exists elsewhere in the universe.

A caution re: "infinite universe". If I encode the universe state in a light cone as large as my lifetime as a number (which seems doable in theory, even though it would be a big number), and I construct the irrational number which is the sequence of all natural numbers lined up in a row, then apply my decoder to each of the numbers in that sequence, I will eventually decode all possible "lifetime states". This would be the equivalent of decoding all possible instants of all possible outcomes of my life (and of any other life with a similar lifespan), with all of the data that represents those outcomes in just one irrational number. If we have an infinite universe, that universe might enumerate all possible outcomes in a similar fashion.

Also, "400 billion" isn't all that big when you compare to the size of the universe, which something like 10^70 orders of magnitude. (Not entirely sure of that number, but its a lot bigger than 10^12.)

But, intelligence may be badly miss-understood. I'm pretty well convinced that folks generally don't understand the tie between self-awareness and decision making. For example, the brain probably has to do a lot of work to compensate for latency between perception and decision making.

A curious argument which ties evolution and teleology: The universe seems to by physically constructed to give rise to intelligence as a side effect of systems such as the earth-moon-sun environment, where you have energy pushed into an iterative system (the chemical goo on the earth's surface), which is allowed to accumulate structure then pushed across region boundaries (say, climate change in old Africa). Intelligence may be a probable outcome given the right physical circumstances. Or course, that takes us back to a question of the likely hood of the circumstances.

Thanks!

TomB