Exactly. The only way you’re really going to get multiple sentient species on a planet at once is if they evolve near-simultaneously in non-competing environments (ie one on land, and the other in the deep sea).
You’re wrong though, numerous species of crows, dolphins, and primates exhibit inventive tool use, complex social structures, and the cultural transmission of knowledge. Given a few million years and the right environmental pressures, any of those species could potentially reach human levels of intelligence. Primates are pretty close to us in the evolutionary tree, but dolphins are rather far removed, and crows aren’t even in the same Taxonomic Class, being more closely related to dinosaurs than to mammals.
It’s possible that the abiogenesis of multi-cellular life is exceedingly rare, since we’ve so far not been able to willfully replicate what should be a simple, self-organizing process — and since we’ve so far not found any conclusive evidence that such life exists in other potentially habitable places in our solar system like Europa and Mars.
But once multi-cellular life does exist, it seems like the eventual evolution of social animals with large brains is not that uncommon.
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One time a blackbird waddled up to me while I was in a rocking chair and sat down with a weary look on his beak. I said to him, “so, whatcha drinking”.
He said, " I’ll take a whiskey if you got one."
My reply, “okay, Old Crow it is.”
True story.
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I wouldn’t be surprised is abiogenesis is common, but the long term conditions for it are fleeting. As in a few billion years in a few pockets. Not to use the cancer example (but I am) it is rare, localized, fleeting, and typically ends.
Information, even with quantum entanglement, is still bound to the rules of general relativity. So with universal expansion there is no way a single species will dominate. Which means supernovas, giant rocks, magnetars, resource depletion, etc will wipe every civilization out.
Have a hug and a cookie from your upbeat uncle @japhroaig!!
“People might exist in Europe. They could’ve existed there for a long time. But if they had, they probably would have invented ships and planes and other forms of travel, so they could be here by now. But there aren’t any European people in my living room. Therefore, there are no people in Europe.” There must be a logical problem with that line of thought…
Regarding aliens, there is the argument that we have no evidence of their existence. But why should we? If you assume that we are omniscient and already know everything that can ever be learned, then it’s reasonable to see a lack of evidence as probable lack of existence. But we’re not. The fact that we don’t know about something doesn’t mean it isn’t real. How long did it take us to discover bacteria, which were here all along?
We make too many assumptions about what aliens would be doing and how they would be communicating. (Of course they’d be using high-power radio on this specific frequency! Of course they’d be trying to colonize Earth!) The failure of those bad assumptions is no reason to think that they don’t exist.
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I don’t think it’s going to be that easy. Even if we can build a replicator type device, how are you going to move the consciousness? Though I supposed you could have someone sitting on earth plugged into an avatar. At any rate, whether they have FTL tech or generational ships, if they are using a communication system we can’t pick up, we won’t see them.
My theory is basically the same as yours, but with a bit more to back it up. We don’t have the technology to detect even our own civilization’s radio emissions if we were parked at Proxima Centauri. And our civilization has been getting quiter over EM as the decades go by as we’ve gone from DEW radar lighting up the entire ionosphere to fiber optics and narrowcast satellite uplinks. At best, we’d only be able to detect a deliberate narrowcast beamed right at us at a little over a hundred ly away. And that’s chump change over even intragalactic distances.
Sadly, I’d say the true Great Filter is the difficulty of STL interstellar colonization.
I’d rather not get too deep into metaphysics or other philosophy, but where
do you think consciousness resides?
Corvids and dolphins have had a few million years; primates and whales go back much more. So far only one example has reached the level of intelligence and technology we are talking about when we look for alien transmissions. Let’s grant, as @Tynam says, that this is simply because humans happened to reach that stage first.
But still it isn’t true that these are really far apart taxonomically, save from our mammal-centric perspective. All of them are amniotes, which we treat as multiple classes but are in many ways less diverse than for instance bony fish. They form a single branch of a kingdom much more dominated by insects, crustaceans, snails, worms, polyps, and so on. A kingdom that has been diversifying for more than half a billion years before anything got to the point we are talking about.
When from all this time and diversity, only the amniotes and cephalopods are known to have any species with inclination toward tool use, it seems a pretty large jump to describe their evolution as common. It’s not hard for me to picture a world of fish, bugs, and worms without anything more intelligent; except for a relatively small percentage of species, that’s basically Earth.
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Magrathea created the earth.
Snark aside, it is either a measurement problem, a lack of cogent hypothesis (I.e. what is intelligence), an information travel problem (I.e. C), or we are being messed with by a universal Joss Whedon with an enormous beard.
Wait, there was snark in there…
BTW, even though they were closely related to us, several species gained what we would call intelligence. They are just … (Shuffles feet)… Extinct.
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I’d be happy to say space is much bigger than light is fast and leave it at that, but your pessimism and snark at least deserves a comic.
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Not to mention all those other hominid species that apparently got in our way.
Of course, if it’s true that different intelligent species don’t tend to cohabitate well then that would be a good argument against seeking out the company of others.
Believe it or not, but I am not pessimistic. I think we have a measurement or cognition problem. I.e. we don’t know how to measure intelligence, and how to quantify it.
So regardless of distances, I am not sure we would recognize navajoes on mars, let alone intelligent whales on Europa.
I don’t know. I am not talking about a soul, per se, but we still don’t understand how our brains think and store data. And is all RAM, once we flip that switch off, it’s gone. Aside from the fact that I don’t know if an atom-by-atom replicator is even possible, assuming it is, I don’t think just replicating the brain will also replicate the memories and consciousness.
Of course I am getting cynical in my old age. I have always loved science fiction, but some of it honestly is pure fantasy. Oh sure we have some plausible theory of how maybe it could work - but that doesn’t mean it will. We are bound in a rather harsh, mundane universe. Like artificial gravity, levitation, light sabers - it may as well all be grey bearded wizards with pointy hats.
There, FTFY. “Can’t” is an extremely premature conclusion. Our ability to study the living brain’s functions in-depth and non-invasively is practically in its infancy, you know.
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All very true. It’s certainly easy to imagine an Earth that remained beetle-world, or at least no-amniote-world.
But is there any reason to suppose that all worlds are inclined to remain beetle-world?
It’s obvious that it’s very possible, simply from the time span that elapsed between worm-ancestors and mammals. Clearly there’s no immediate evolutionary pressure to develop larger life forms - without which, intelligence is unlikely.
But that time gap is actually quite small, in terms of the history of the Earth. Since there is an ecological niche for “large herbivore”, it’s also quite possible to imagine that sooner or later a beetle would develop to fill it.
The real jump - the one that it looks even more like it need never have happened - is from single-celled to multicellular life. That one’s an even larger problem for our hopes of meeting anyone else worth talking to.
This may well be a possibility. But you’d think that others would’ve gotten beyond rudimentary tool-use even by those standards.
Bear in mind that elephants have extremely large brains, have complex social structures etc. etc. and have had, at least as long as our lineage.
The differences between us is astronomical.
I believe that intelligence (you all know what I mean) must be far, far rarer than life itself.
I was always of the opinion that once we could get an atom-by-atom scanner and replicator, the consciousness would be re-created with the new body. I never really believed in some non-physical “soul”, I figured it all just lived in the cells. But yeah, I don’t anticipate that arriving any time in my lifetime, or even in my grandchildren’s lifetime, frankly. Still, maybe someday.
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Good point, that was a sloppy and in accurate turn of phrase.
