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Threads like this always devolve into "literally whatever political problem earth has right now, that is the great filter" 100% of the time. My answer to the fermi paradox is that without a clean alien free universe to compare to we have no way of knowing what minor meaningless anomalies we know about mean anything until some alien tells us and we retroactively know we detected tons of aliens all the time. Like an uncontacted tribe right now could see plane contrails every day but why jump to the conclusion "flying men are in that thing" when a sane person would just go "oh, guess that is one of the types of clouds that exist" like no one is out there telling them that rainbows are a regular part of nature, contrails aren't, the longer hotter summers are a thing people did somewhere but the earthquake is just a thing that happens sometime. Without context it's never going to be easy to know what is or isn't fully natural and thats stuff you could figure out eventually but there is literally no mystery in astronomy that has existed so long or so deep that we are even 1% of the way to saying "oh, it must be aliens, we studied this so in depth there is no way it couldn't be" even if ultimately something somewhere was. Like there is less than 1/3rd the amount of lithium in the universe current models say there should be, we should spend like at least a hundred years of trying to figure out how our model is wrong before ANYONE goes "an alien ate it" which is good science, but applies to everything and like, if an alien did eat it we aren't gonna know till we really really really exhaust every other way better possibility.
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Nov 29, 2018 16:42
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Like here is a short list of some currently unsolved problems in astrophysics. You could write a sci-fi story about any of these being caused by aliens, but anyone suggesting that seriously should rightfully be kicked out of science, no one anywhere is anywhere near that stumped that anyone should be jumping to that conclusion, but that means humans are not actually far enough along to detect aliens at all. Our knowledge is way too simple to be anywhere near the point that we ruled out everything to the point we could look at something weird and go "yup, must be aliens". Maybe in a thousand more years of trying and failing to answer questions with more realistic answers. We need to know a hell of a lot more about the universe to be anywhere near the point we could see anything but bleep blorp the alien personally to detect something and say "yes, only explanation for this is aliens did it". We detect things we can't currently explain constantly, even knowing if anything meant anything is way beyond where we are. Even if something did. ---------- Astrophysical jet: Why do only certain accretion discs surrounding certain astronomical objects emit relativistic jets along their polar axes? Why are there quasi-periodic oscillations in many accretion discs?[33] Why does the period of these oscillations scale as the inverse of the mass of the central object?[34] Why are there sometimes overtones, and why do these appear at different frequency ratios in different objects?[35] Diffuse interstellar bands: What is responsible for the numerous interstellar absorption lines detected in astronomical spectra? Are they molecular in origin, and if so which molecules are responsible for them? How do they form? Supermassive black holes: What is the origin of the M-sigma relation between supermassive black hole mass and galaxy velocity dispersion?[36] How did the most distant quasars grow their supermassive black holes up to 1010 solar masses so early in the history of the universe? Rotation curve of a typical spiral galaxy: predicted (A) and observed (B). Can the discrepancy between the curves be attributed to dark matter? Kuiper cliff: Why does the number of objects in the Solar System's Kuiper belt fall off rapidly and unexpectedly beyond a radius of 50 astronomical units? Flyby anomaly: Why is the observed energy of satellites flying by Earth sometimes different by a minute amount from the value predicted by theory? Galaxy rotation problem: Is dark matter responsible for differences in observed and theoretical speed of stars revolving around the centre of galaxies, or is it something else? p-nuclei: What astrophysical process is responsible for the nucleogenesis of these rare isotopes? Ultra-high-energy cosmic ray:[17] Why is it that some cosmic rays appear to possess energies that are impossibly high, given that there are no sufficiently energetic cosmic ray sources near the Earth? Why is it that (apparently) some cosmic rays emitted by distant sources have energies above the Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin limit?[4][17] Rotation rate of Saturn: Why does the magnetosphere of Saturn exhibit a (slowly changing) periodicity close to that at which the planet's clouds rotate? What is the true rotation rate of Saturn's deep interior?[37] Origin of magnetar magnetic field: What is the origin of magnetar magnetic field? Large-scale anisotropy: Is the universe at very large scales anisotropic, making the cosmological principle an invalid assumption? The number count and intensity dipole anisotropy in radio, NRAO VLA Sky Survey (NVSS) catalogue[38] is inconsistent with the local motion as derived from cosmic microwave background[39][40] and indicate an intrinsic dipole anisotropy. The same NVSS radio data also shows an intrinsic dipole in polarization density and degree of polarization[41] in the same direction as in number count and intensity. There are several other observation revealing large-scale anisotropy. The optical polarization from quasars shows polarization alignment over a very large scale of Gpc.[42][43][44] The cosmic-microwave-background data shows several features of anisotropy,[45][46][47][48] which are not consistent with the Big Bang model. Space roar: Why is space roar six times louder than expected? What is the source of space roar? Age–metallicity relation in the Galactic disk: Is there a universal age–metallicity relation (AMR) in the Galactic disk (both "thin" and "thick" parts of the disk)? Although in the local (primarily thin) disk of the Milky Way there is no evidence of a strong AMR,[49] a sample of 229 nearby "thick" disk stars has been used to investigate the existence of an age–metallicity relation in the Galactic thick disk, and indicate that there is an age–metallicity relation present in the thick disk.[50][51] Stellar ages from asteroseismology confirm the lack of any strong age-metallicity relation in the Galactic disc.[52] The lithium problem: Why is there a discrepancy between the amount of lithium-7 predicted to be produced in Big Bang nucleosynthesis and the amount observed in very old stars?[53] Ultraluminous pulsar: The ultraluminous X-ray source M82 X-2 was thought to be a black hole, but in October 2014 data from NASA's space-based X-ray telescope NuStar indicated that M82 X-2 is a pulsar many times brighter than the Eddington limit. Fast radio bursts: Transient radio pulses lasting only a few milliseconds, from emission regions thought to be no larger than a few hundred kilometres, and estimated to occur several hundred times a day. While several theories have been proposed, there is no generally accepted explanation for them. The only known repeating FRB emanates from a galaxy roughly 3 billion light years from Earth.[54][55]
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Nov 29, 2018 16:59
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Haystack posted:Every single alien civilization has lived and died in its own home system. Even if FTL travel were possible (which it almost certainly is not), the resource costs of operating in space are too high. Gravity wells are a bitch, to say nothing of the radiation. Say the opposite, say that aliens are flying around everywhere in ships the size of buildings nonstop every day. Unless one was like, right here right now, why would we detect that? How would we detect that? If someone DID detect it why would "aliens" be a reasonable explanation instead of literally any other explanation. Like if there was a billion spaceships flying between random stars right this second what exactly are we supposed to have detected? radio waves? anonymous mass distribution? high energy particles? unexpected element distributions? we detect that sort of stuff all day every day and simply do not have any sort of information to determine why. We aren't gonna get a picture of an alien holding a sign or something.
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Nov 29, 2018 17:36
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MSDOS KAPITAL posted:If we were to look at such a galaxy with a telescope, it would be immediately apparent to us that that galaxy was populated with intelligent life. How? Name a single measurement we could make that any sane scientist in 2018 would look at and say "gotta be aliens". We already have galaxies that are wrong or against our predictions in every way imaginable, but that is because we are still very new to astrophysics and have a very very basic understanding of what the numbers even SHOULD be. Declaring anything aliens at this point would be madness. We literally do not have the tools to see an alien at this point or to know if anything we could see could even be a sign of an alien. Like we need like 500 more years of astrophysics to have any numbers solid enough to know something is wrong. The answer to the fermi paradox is "welp, we've looked no where and found nothing, time to give up" before even knowing enough to even know if we found something.
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Nov 29, 2018 18:44
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qkkl posted:
What is "alien electromagnetic radiation" though? It's not like it'd glow green and have extra eyes or something. We currently detect all sorts of electromagnetic radiation we don't know what the heck it is, but by virtue of not knowing what it is we are far from being able to even sort out if any of it even was anything.
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Nov 29, 2018 19:11
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qkkl posted:Radiation that has complex patterns in it. For example digital human radio signals are usually divided into chunks. Like, if there was other aliens in our solar system right this second or something maybe. Otherwise there is tons of anomalyous radio activity, fast radio bursts and the space roar, holes in the background radiation, tons of stuff. and none of that is aliens, but the fact our understanding is so bad means we can't even search for most types of deviations. Like we are not at the point we can look at a quasar radio pulse and say "well clearly if this is 18% off then that means aliens changed it". that is absurd at this point. we need rock solid knowledge of things before we can even know what is artificial.
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Nov 29, 2018 19:45
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Kerning Chameleon posted:That's adorable, you still believe in Asimovian fairy tales of human existence extended beyond the Oort Cloud. Don't worry, dear, one day I'm sure you'll realize the situation you described in that post is exactly as realistic as the literal events of Lord of the Rings. What are you doing with your life that "gonna call this woman dear and dismiss her" is a normal reaction for this (is the poster a woman? or are you also trying to call someone a woman as an insult?)
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Nov 29, 2018 19:47
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Why is the idea that killer alien probes being invisible is some common sense no duh thing but if joe the alien was in a probe we'd instantly see it no matter what by 2018 or it can't exist? Other than untreated depression why would reapers be able to be a thing we can't detect but just an alien hanging out making out with his space wife something that not detecting means must not exist?
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Nov 29, 2018 21:32
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axeil posted:The Berserker theory is an interesting one and sort of ties into the one example above. Any time a species gets relativistic flight, the Berserkers show up and destroy them because they possess the ultimate weapon: throwing a stone at a civilization at near the speed of light. Again though, if berserkers are everywhere why doesn't the fermi paradox apply to "if berserkers are everywhere, why don't we see them"? if not seeing things is possible than we solved the fermi paradox without berserkers.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:07
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axeil posted:
Like that in general is so clearly the solution to the femi paradox, our actual study of the universe is in it's infancy and we literally are just barely into the study of most astronomical objects. There is absolutely zero reason we would have noticed aliens by now in any meaningful way. Name anything about the study of space and there is massive unanswered questions. The answers aren't going to be 'aliens did it" but without solid answers we can't actually know what is anomalous.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:22
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Kerning Chameleon posted:This is why discussions about the Fermi Paradox that don't end with "we simply can't detect them with our lovely instruments" get real facile real fast. Yeah, I feel like people absurdly overestimate how much we have completed research into space and the universe. Like the idea that if there was aliens in another GALAXY we'd have seen them by now. We barely can resolve even individual stars in anything but the closest galaxies.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:55
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Lightning Knight posted:Isn't the problem with this that even not going faster than light, one could still colonize other planets given a sufficiently large time scale (i.e. millions of years), and given the age of the universe (i.e. billions of years) this implies we fundamentally misunderstand something about the galaxy or that somehow there has not been intelligent life before us? or that there is plenty of intelligence all sorts of places and there was no actual rule that it'd reveal itself by 2018 or we would know there was none. We have barely done any seti stuff and have completed like, a couple radio frequency searches on like a small percentage of the stars near us. The idea we searched so hard and so completely the entire universe that we need to start coming up with explanations is pretty absurd.
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Nov 29, 2018 23:19
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Lightning Knight posted:This makes more sense to me. Like almost all of organized seti is for microwave radiation that is not absorbed by our atmosphere originating from nearby stars. That is something, but the totality of what it rules out is not nearly absolute. If everyone just uses 10ghz microwave radiation or live farther away than we can check or use directional lasers we basically haven't looked at all. If they encrypt or compress things it's even worse, since that looks more and more like random noise so we are really looking for analog broadcast. If it's anything past that we are even more babies in the crib, like in 2009 we discovered the space roar, a band of cm range radio we had never looked at out of the atmosphere before where we expected to be essentially quiet with a faint signal where instead we found a constant static louder than all previously known radio signals in the entire galaxy combined. Or like cosmic rays, we have detectors and sometimes we see single particles going so close to the speed of light that it's a signal atomic nuclei with more force than a baseball and our answer for where they come from is basically "no idea at this point". And again, I'm not suggesting either of these things are aliens, but that people are talking crazy that we are near the end of the search, we are absolutely not. We are absolutely at the absolute beginning of collecting the absolute preliminary data about our universe. Like we are not at the point we have checked the cm radio range so thoroughly and completely we must now declare no signals are set through that, we are at the point we were are just a few years past checking it even enough to notice "oh hey, a giant nonstop constant roar is on this frequency boy our theory that range would be near silent and a good place to investigate background radiation with a space telescope was sure wrong!"
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Nov 29, 2018 23:54
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Kerning Chameleon posted:Self repairing nanobots that do not survive well beyond the ionosphere at all. There is radiation in space but like, you are wildly overstating things, there is less radiation in interstellar space than in the solar system. It's a thing you'd have to design for but it's not some mystical force that would reduce all physical objects to ruin. You can just put a wall in front of something and it stops radiation too, and our solar system and most others have very convenient giant collections of free rocks you can take in any size you need for the trip right at the exits. Also a dude not being able to go isn't really a barrier to a species spreading to a whole galaxy anyway. like if it's a million years from now and we are really sure we absolutely can't send any dudes we could still just send bunches and bunches of those bacteria that live 6 miles deep in rocks in little sealed up ecosystems and spray them in every direction nonstop and make sure to include plenty of very sturdy bibles and ayn rand books or whatever it is we feel will be important for our weird kids to find in a hundred million years to pass on to them. we could still colonize the galaxy with earth life even if we don't get to come personally Owlofcreamcheese fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Nov 30, 2018 |
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Nov 30, 2018 00:41
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Kerning Chameleon posted:
People only like spooky visions of the bad future, if you ever name anything nice happening it gets written off as nonsense (by you for example) so instead of sending normal bacteria we will only send bacteria where the most conserved regions of the DNA are genetically altered to include the entire text of fountainhead. only sending out bacteria with a hope they eventually evolve into intelligences millions of years later after we are long dead as a way to colonize the universe is sad but like, all living things ever do is send their kids off to carry things on long after they are gone. plus all it takes is one alien species doing that that doesn't think it's too sad and loves space cumming all over the entire universe for it to happen.
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Nov 30, 2018 00:56
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holy loving poo poo is the the single most horrendous thing i've seen posted in a long time
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Verviticus posted:if the only logical conclusion is that there must always be a bigger bad out there, wouldn't this also stop the biggest bad from operating? and then the first/biggest bad to get over their fear would quickly outpace the ones that are afraid of the theoretical biggest bad Doesn't this apply to basically everything? Isn't this literally how ecosystems work? Just constant churn of different species killing each other and hiding from being killed and fighting back from being killed over and over till it settles into slowly shifting ongoing patterns forever.
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Nov 30, 2018 01:10
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LtStorm posted:there's still potential that microbes of an alien source could be hiding all over Earth and we just haven't spotted them yet. More likely, but also yet unproven, is the idea there is life that evolved on Earth alongside the life we know, but that we haven't noticed yet--it'd all be microbial also, most likely. Hiding all in the earth probably. We know there are bacteria that go 7km down into the crust of the earth at least, they eat sulfur and iron, live for centuries, can dehydrate indefinitely, have massive radiation resistance and have a bunch of extra dna repair abilities. Some bacteria sitting in a pond getting to another planet seems like it would require so many unlikely coincidences. But a lithovore seems almost perfectly suited to the point it's hard to imagine it DOESN'T happen. Like you couldn't drop a horse on any other planet and have it make it, but a bacteria inside a rock wouldn't care what planet it's on or even if it's on a planet as long as it's living in a rock, and we know asteroid strikes can cause intact ejecta, it seems like it'd be so easy for some bit of bacterial life to make it off a planet, luck into getting into an asteroid belt, then just slowly over millions of years transfer asteroid to asteroid as they bump and then slowly spread out everywhere as the asteroids fly off, sometimes landing on planets even. The fact from the bacteria's perspective it's just continuing to sit embedded in a rock reducing iron and sulfur and not caring it's flying around the universe means it can spread nearly anywhere there is rocks. And it's not like bacteria need breeding pairs or anything, you don't need millions of bacteria to survive any specific step, even one is enough to potentially colonize a whole planet on it's own.
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Nov 30, 2018 13:40
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New theory: surface life is a silly transitional state and all real life lives in the pores in rocks, with anyone being silly enough to walk around on the tiny surface area eventually wising up, inventing micro-microchips and moving their progeny back into the only sane environment to live in long term across planets, we don't see radio waves because everyone communicates with rock piercing neutrinos. Actually I think steven baxter wrote a story with that, where most intelligence was naturally occuring neural networks of deep crust bacteria. He is really good at writing vaguely plausible non earthlike life. Like creatures that exist as cellular automata in the interaction of magnetic plasma on and in stars. One of his long running stories has the primary conflict between dark matter creatures that live in the gravity of white dwarfs and aliens that need suns for energy who constantly are at war of trying to direct galactic evolution into conditions that make white dwarfs or long lasting stars in a resource war planning a trillion years ahead. I kinda really like his writing, the general idea is that ANYTHING that could possibly have evolutionary forces on it will eventually lead to something like life given enough time and tries, and earth life is one of the weirder manifestations of it compared to more simple things like storm cells on gas giants.
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Nov 30, 2018 14:25
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zoux posted:that we just can't recognize ET intelligence because it's so different from our own. This but not even lovecraft style of magically unknowable. Like historically victorians were looking at mars for victorian aliens that turned into world war I aliens then we had world war Ii aliens where everything was nuclear, then sneaky cold war aliens, people in the old days talked about people from the stars coming in boats and stuff. Like when we look for aliens we look for popular tv show star trek. with the specific things that contemporary sci-fi looks do, instead of some other sort of sci-fi narrative. like we look for: boat sized ships, ftl, talking on olde timey radio but with pictures sometimes, culture acting just the same even though they invented magic (then agreed to never use it to change society in any unrecognizable way). etc. My human intelligence is exactly the same as my great great great x100 granddad but my motivations and actions would be vastly incomprehensible to him.
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Nov 30, 2018 17:55
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DrSunshine posted:On the same note, is anyone else as Mars is really extremely close compared to other things. Probes go and get there in less than a year. Mariner 7 got there in 131 days. They are launching a jupiter moons probe in 2022 but it's not going to be there till 2030, the mars probe that just landed two days ago launched may 5th.
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Nov 30, 2018 19:43
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as I am about NASA's focus on Mars, when the biggest, most interesting focus for interplanetary exploration would be to send a mission to Europa or Enceladus to search for life under the ice?
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physeter posted:It doesn't matter whether it's Von Neumann probes, radio bursts, surrounding a star in a flickering polarized screen, or whatever. A sufficiently powerful civilization that wants to let the galaxy know they exist can do it. Yeah, but we haven't actually investigated any of those to any sort of level where we can say "welp, we looked everywhere" or even "welp, we looked at all". Like the space roar thing where we assumed a certain CM range of radio broadcasts would be clear if we got out of the atmosphere and then when we actually checked there was a nonstop giant roaring sound coming from every one of the directions checked. Thats not to say that is aliens, but I am saying again "the idea we looked real hard yet is incorrect" science is still ongoing and we are just barely scratching the surface of the start of a bunch of astrophysical research, not something where we are near the end and there is only a few loose spots an alien might hide. Like what percent of stars have we checked for flickering polarized screens? What percent of radio have we checked? Seti only has checked a tiny tiny spectrum and even that is famous for having only found an alien like signal one time and not more.
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Nov 30, 2018 20:37
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physeter posted:Edit: Or this is all a machine dream, and there's no aliens because the construct doesn't use them, and I'm about to wake up in my cryotube or whatever. You wish you had a cryotube, current science moved on from simulation being the most likely thing to Boltzmann brains. That after the "heat death of the universe" every quadrillions of years randomly, a functioning mind experiencing any moment would appear in the vacuum experiance that single experiance and presumably fall instantly because it's just whatever minimum parts you need to be conscious floating in an endless vacuum. But since this has infinite time to happen it doesn't matter how rare it is and consciousnesses that happened this way would outnumber the real sort infinity to 1 so no one has any chance to be anything but that. So odds are, you aren't even a real person, or even a simulation of a person, you are an instantaneous random combination of very cold fluctuating atoms that randomly came together to experiance the exact thing you are now then fall apart with no past or future. And you are just lucky this combination was a reasonably coherent thought instead of the quadrillions of less put together random nonsense that each of the minds that appear once every orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe get.
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Nov 30, 2018 20:47
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EdithUpwards posted:You also have to be an expert photographer with hobbyist level equipment to get a good shot of the moon with a digital camera. What? I took this with an 80 dollar camera. Even crap cameras are amazing these days. Someone with a fancy DLSR that knew what an f-stop is would have taken a better picture than this, but it's an okay picture, if I do say so myself. 
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Dec 1, 2018 15:01
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Lightning Knight posted:This whole post was really interesting and I put it in the OP, but I have a specific question about this part. There are other species on Earth that seem obviously intelligent, but they didn't make the jump to intelligence as we understand it. Is this because of humans providing ecological pressure and effectively crowding them out, or is it because intelligence is actually a rare trait? Is there a way to know that? Other than some weirdos like squid and crows that are doing their own thing most of the really smart animals are mammals and generally are modern versions that evolved pretty recently. Like bottlenose dolphins are ~5 million years old. We crossed the magic line where being a tiny bit smarter hits the singularity and we invent complex language and explode into being able to make cellphones like 100 generations later but that isn't really that far ahead in the grand scheme of things. It's not like everyone else has been failing and failing for ages. The other smart animals are only a little older (or younger!) than we are. We won the race, but just barely, lots and lots of mammals have been rapidly developing more neural complexity. We have only been around a short amount of time, with tons and tons of animals only slightly behind us. we are loving up elephants so there isn't going to be much elephant future left, but if they had another few million years, they probably aren't much dumber than we were a few million years ago.
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Dec 1, 2018 23:07
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mycomancy posted:To answer your question, here's the short list of animals we think of as being at least somewhat intelligent: us, pigs, dogs, elephants, various cetaceans, various apes, various corvids, and maaaaaaybe octopi. So we aren't crowding out intelligence at low levels. Despite these numerous examples of "low level intelligence," we don't seen other intelligence peers on the planet even though presumably the apes at least are as smart as our common ancestors were. So why? like pigs and dogs are only a few thousand years old and come from ancestors like wolves and boars that are only evolved 4-8 million years ago, bottle nose dolphins are only 5 million years old, chimps are 5-8 (and basically did evolve intelligence by being us), modern elephants have only been around for a million years. Like we aren't THAT far ahead of other animals, and they are mostly animals that are some dumber than us, but also not any older than us. It isn't really like a bunch of candidate animals have been sitting around for billions of years failing to make the jump. It's more like mammals got a bunch of neural complexity and we are just one inch ahead and got fire that let us eat more soft meat that let us invent language that let us invent writing that let us invent space ships. Like we were as dumb as an elephant really recently, but there is a line you cross and apparent intelligence goes vertical but we only crossed that a little ahead of everything else, they haven't been failing to cross it for much longer than we did.
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Dec 1, 2018 23:37
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The Butcher posted:
is that the one about crabs that have sex at the wrong time of year and turn into crab minorities?
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Dec 1, 2018 23:38
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mycomancy posted:Sorry dude. It IS a depressing topic when you weed out the sci-fi and get to the hard facts. Just saying wristcutter stuff doesn't make something more serious. You are not being some extra grown up adult calling living things "rotting meat cages" and worrying about the year 500 million AD killing off a bunch of intelligent animals. 1990s comics infected your brain that just saying gritty things is more serious than saying nicer things. The Butcher posted:Close but giant spiders. I'm not mocking it either, I read it when I was a kid and it was new and literally all I remember is the crab (spider) people had a mating season when the sun came out but once they invented electric lights you could mate all year long but if you did everyone made your spider baby an oppressed minority.
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Dec 1, 2018 23:54
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mycomancy posted:Show us your hog OOCC. You have posted this a couple times in multiple threads and I don't feel like I get the joke.
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Dec 2, 2018 00:10
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mycomancy posted:there are currently and have been previously a multitude of animals that could support the neurology. There isn't really semi-intelligent animals that have been on earth significantly longer than people have been. dolphins and elephants are younger species than humans, dogs and pigs are younger than agriculture, and aren't from animals that have been around any longer than people. octopus and crows are amazing and some of the coolest and most clever things that exist, but die young and aren't really as smart as a dolphin or chimp, just alien and cool about how clever they are. Like we are ahead of the other semi-intelligent animals, but not really much, like we beat them, but just so barely. many of them are younger than we are. It's not like we evolved intelligence while everything else tried and failed for a billion years or something, we beat everything else by like a week.
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Dec 2, 2018 00:17
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is asking to see my dick a fortnite thing? why are you kids asking to see my dick?
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Dec 2, 2018 00:24
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Lightning Knight posted:So what you're saying is that it's possibly likely that the conditions that spurred the development of human intelligence as we understood it may be simply extraordinarily rare by chance? But what indicates it's rare? in the last 15 million years we have gotten like 1 human intelligence, plus like 3 or 4 other related hominids that had near/equal/(superior?) human intelligence, plus like 10 other near near human intelligent mammals plus crows and octopuses, (and ant colonies or whatever other weirdo side thing you wanna count as quasi-intelligent), earth seems to be bursting with intelligent creatures with humans only being slightly ahead and only very recently. Like were 100 animals supposed to get sentient at the exact same instant? a bunch of stuff getting towards the threshold and then one being like 10% ahead of everything else seems like the literal only way it could happen. If elephants were going to evolve fire in 2 million years that is basically simultaneous to us doing it in evolutionary terms.
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Dec 2, 2018 00:40
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mycomancy posted:Re: OOCC, he shits up every thread he gets into. He's a scourge in the Tech Nightmare thread that makes fishmech look smart, and when I brought up a serious philosophical question, is it ethical to raise an animal to sentience so that now it knows it'll die in the future, he started bitching about kids and comic books. If intelligent life makes it to the year 500 million AD we are definitely leaving the solar system and me saying that is as much a hard fact as your thing about inventing furries who die when the sun warms and calling living things "meat cages". being pessimistic about the future and hating living things is not more serious than being optimistic. We went to the moon in the 1960s, making space habits is more difficult than that, but one of the catgirls you think are going to exist can certainly figure it out given a million years, let alone 500 million. Like that is the weirdest thing about your story, most people say we won't go to space because we are in the end times and jesus/the USSR/pollution/y2k/mayans/etc is coming to end things soon but the idea that intelligent life made in a civilization that can grant intelligence to things is going to live 500 million years but not ever figure out space travel is not remotely a 'hard fact"
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Dec 2, 2018 00:51
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Adar posted:Sample size problem: you're looking at the animals that are around today and going "yep, these are all as smart as anything has ever been, intelligence is a race to the top, pack it in boys". Mammals have a bunch of brain complexity other animals don't have. It's totally possible animals in the past evolved then lost equivalent stuff repeatedly but there isn't any evidence for that, and if it's the case it makes intelligence seem to be even more trivially achievable if a bunch of things were evolving it totally independently instead of the modern day where we have all the quasi-intelligent animals be mostly not so distantly related in grand terms. (octopuses are the neatest thing in the world and are clever as gently caress, crows too, but they aren't like chimps/dolphins/elephants. they are pretty simple but have such totally different brains they come up with stuff that is really fascinating, they went in a totally different direction than us and their basic skills are things that are advanced skills for our branch of evolution, so we kinda elevate them as smart in a way they aren't, but they are still really cool!!)
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Dec 2, 2018 01:12
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qkkl posted:I don't think it's so much intelligence that separates humans from, say, chimps, but rather education. Homo Sapiens 50,000 years ago would not have appeared to be much more advanced than chimps; they'd be living in caves and using simple tools to hunt. But what allowed humans to jump so far ahead of other animals is the invention of language, where older humans could teach younger humans things, and that allowed knowledge to build up so new humans didn't have to relearn everything from scratch and could spend their time learning new things about the world instead. Also physically fire worked as an external digestive tract and is a big reason homo erectus could start to evolve such a big brain that took so much energy to run. so dumb dumb animal just has to get smart enough to start making fires and then they can afford to evolve a bunch of luxury features. and then once you have that you have language and writing taking over for ultra rapid development. So we have tools a billion times better than a chimp, but once you pass a particular line the development goes vertical, first by very fast evolution to take advantage of the extremely increased energy intake then as you said, because of education and culture.
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Dec 2, 2018 05:52
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Telsa Cola posted:Fire likely is not it. Other species exploit fires just as early homnids would have and by all reckoning have been doing so since wild fires have been a thing. Just because they didnt make a camp fire doesnt mean they werent exploiting cooked food, though Im sure you could argue about the difference in nutrient value in something cooked over a fire rather then something being burned to death in a fire. Wait, what? It's not like if you ever eat one cooked meat you get +45 INT and can go to college. It's that learning to cook or prepare food means you suddenly can get more food energy and take less energy to digest it from the same environment. Which means you evolutionarily can find new uses for excess energy. Same with hunting technology. intelligence snowballs in evolution because once you cross the line of inventing the first few things it removes more and more environmental factors
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Dec 2, 2018 14:15
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Telsa Cola posted:The same argument, less energy needed to digest food and more food energy, can be made for tool use, since it drastically lowers the amount of calories needed to butcher a carcass and allows access to high nutrient items like bone marrow and brains. With a flint chopper you can get way more meat from a carcass or whatever in a limited amount of time then you could by just tearing or whatever. If you are scavenging or hunting on contested safaris this also means you can get what you need and scram before something meaner then you shows up. Yeah. fire, spears, cooking tools, stone axes, if you are a dumb dumb animal who is just barely scraping along with dim intelligence and just barely barely cross the line you start to build things you suddenly open up huge amounts of energy from the same environment and open more and more the better your tools are and your control of them so it's possible to quickly railroad down that path, where once one guy invents the just barely working rock axe and suddenly is hugely more fit than everyone else, with any kids that are better able to master it being even more advantageous until we got such big brains women's pelvises are splitting and they are dying cuz our head got too big and you gotta stop.
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Dec 2, 2018 14:36
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Telsa Cola posted:Yes, but this explanation runs into the issue of why other animals who use similar tools do not experince the same run away effects we did. Have we not? all the good examples of tool using animals are much much much smarter than similar species that don't use tools. octopuses are nearly unfathomably smarter than most invertebrates even while still having a bad invertebrate brain. And like I mentioned before, bottlenose dolphins and elephants, the two most complex tool using animals, are somewhat younger species than hominids, and it's absolutely possible the dolphins putting sponges on their nose and the elephants covering water with stuff so it doesn't dry up too fast would have been the australopithecus of elephants.
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Dec 2, 2018 14:54
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Telsa Cola posted:Fish will use rocks to break poo poo open, alligators and such will lay traps with sticks to lure food to them. I wouldnt say either of them display the effects of run away intelligence growth? You are kinda scraping the bottom of the barrel on tool use. But sure, we can't know what the future will/would have held and maybe the exponential growth applies to alligators too and 50 million years from now the ones with sticks on their nose will be building airplanes because of the extremely small step of very extremely small tool use now accelerating their intelligence going forward. quote:Its entirely possible that they have had as much time as homnids to experience the effects. or maybe more time, but evolution is a process with huge random elements no matter how directed it is, even if something is hugely favored you still are going to have it happen at it's own speed. If by luck elephants and hominids started the same exact day millions of years ago and humans are at jet planes and elephants are at "moving things to stand on them and using sticks to hit things" that isn't actually that huge of a difference given the time scale. You'd always expect variation in exactly how long any evolution takes even if something is favored.
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Dec 2, 2018 15:23
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khwarezm posted:I don't really know how to word this correctly but I kind of wonder if evolutionary pressure has made animals, on average, more intelligent overall now than any point in the past, even if Humans could be somehow excluded. We basically know that to be true. We talk about brains as being just one thing, but they really are groups of organs doing a bunch of things and those organs appeared over time. Like the various leaps in intelligence mostly came with whole new brain organs or major mutations in current brain organs into new functions instead of just using the same old brain better. Like you can look reptiles to monotremes to mammals where reptiles have no neocortex, monotremes have a small one that connects poorly then all mammals have one and humans have it taking up a large part of their whole head. While birds developed "Nidopallium" that reptiles didn't have and in the same way dumb birds have it but it's a small part of the brain but by the time you get up to ravens it's filling their head.
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Dec 2, 2018 18:15
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physeter posted:Ants (i) practice engineering and agriculture, (ii) domesticate other animals for food, (iii) make war for territory and resources, and take slaves, (iv) recognize each other on an individual level, (v) get better at their tasks over the course of their lives, (vi) deliberately inoculate each other from pathogens, (vii) isolate themselves from the colony if they are very ill, (viii) will attempt to rescue one another from peril ,even at risk, (ix) will rescue the "children" first, and (x) have established thriving settlements on every continent except Antarctica, even in the harshest deserts or most oppressive jungles. That's just for openers. There is tons of sci-fi about killer bugs from beyond the stars and leiningen versus the ants but xenomorphs and alien bug hiveminds, but is there any sci-fi where we meet aliens and they are all just mindless ants that just eventually have a bunch of evolved behaviors that result in space ships and stuff and our thing of thinking about stuff and coming up with things personally is a weird aberration compared to the normal way of inventing things by evolving the task over millions of fast dying generations?
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Dec 3, 2018 16:56
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