Actually, my point is that since humans can self replicate and are made of matter, we can make a device made out matter that emulates human minds and can self replicate and perform all the physical tasks a human can do. That device need not age like humans and it can be much more resistant to radiation than humans are. Also it can have variable clockspeed so that the perceived time of an interstellar transit can be reasonable.
You actually could reasonably argue that making a tin can full of humans and getting it to another star might be impossible, because you just can’t make enough radiation shielding and humans would fight too much, being crammed into a can.
A person seeing things that way - such as an older person, familiar with arguments made in the 1960s and 1970s, when most people were skeptical that artificial intelligence that emulated human minds was even possible, might reason that humans, crammed into a can, would never survive an interstellar journey. They might be right. And other aliens, also little “green” biological men, would run into the same issue. That’s where I think Sam Stone is coming from. He doesn’t have a clear concept of how you would build a machine that is just as smart and creative as the humans who made it - probably much better in both ways - and so you wouldn’t need to “test” it over millenia - any engineering problem that the humans who made it can solve, it could solve.
Well, no. I get your point that if a human intelligence can exist, then the concept of intelligence itself is proven. Fine. Getting from that to self-replicating intelligences that can be flung across the universe is a HUGE leap. For example, just how much mass do you think we’d have to launch for a probe to be able to replicate itself and re-launch from another star system? It has to build factories, it has to have fuel to soft-land on an unknown body, it has to have rovers and drills and the capability to make more and bigger equipment once it gets there.
When you look at the energy requirements to accelerate a kilo of material to some significant fraction of the speed of light, you might get to a point where you need so damned much energy just to get the probe there that it hardly makes sense.
Then the thing has to survive for hundreds to tens of thousands of years in interstellar space. Long enough that radioactive piles degrade due to half-life, there’s no enough energy for solar power, etc. Cosmic rays are hitting circuits and damaging them. At interstellar speeds, a grain of sand could destroy the ship. Since we’ve never traveled to another star, or even much out of our own heliosphere, we have no idea how survivable that environment is.
Some of these hugely energy inefficient missions are going to fail, simply because they’ll get to their target star system and fail to find the right combination of accessible materials for reproduction. Or they’ll crash attempting to land somewhere, or suffer a fluke accident.
Yes, biological systems can reproduce. I think we all get that. That’s a far cry from saying that we can therefore build self-replicating robots with traveling factories and we can successfully send them on a galaxy-conquering mission.
Really? You’ve got all that worked out, huh? So all we need is a sentient artificial intelligence and a machine that can simply break down any matter and transmute it into any other material. Child’s play, really. We know we can do this, because we have mirrors.
Well, given your magic technologies that automatically spring from the basic truism that life replicates itself, I see your point.
But that brings up another question: If you had the ability to transmute matter into anything you want, just why would you need to travel to other star systems at all? What’s the point? At least, until you’ve completely re-engineered your entire solar system?
And if it were so easy o do, then the Fermi Paradox comes into play again: Where are they? If you think life is ubiquitous, and it leads inevitably to intelligence (at least often enough that there should be plenty around), then our entire galaxy should have been transformed. Or at the very least, we should be able to see signatures of massive changes in other star systems. And we haven’t.
Then where did those elements come from? Here’s a hint: the event that sent this matter interstellar distances was so destructive that not even atoms survived. So yes, matter can reach other stars, but you want to send complex machines, not just mass of arbitrary composition.
Now we’ve arrived at something we can both agree on. What are we missing? Current peer reviewed science actually does say it would be “easy” to do. My “somehow” was I wanted to avoid arguing the particulars of a specific method. We actually *do *have a clear concept regarding how to make self replicating equipment. There’s an expensive start-up cost, which is why we haven’t done it, but our current chemical catalysts and study of biological enzymes show the concept should work. Similarly, we just recently made an array of neural emulation computer chips that can emulate a rodent brain. Human scale actually is “just” a matter of money, and a massive project, similar to the Human Genome project but even bigger, to steal the neural pattern of sentience out of actual preserved human brains.
Many credible scientists believe that if you could build an artificial machine that is even slightly smarter than the humans who made it, that machine could help bootstrap the design of a better version than itself, and so on and so forth until you hit the limitations of physics. A sigmoidal growth curve.
I personally think it’s not going to take 1000 years, I think we’re going to be able to do it this century, because of the nonlinear factors involved.
So it makes the silence through the telescopes even more ominous. There could be something catastrophic we just don’t know. What if you can release the mass-energy in regular matter extremely easily, with equipment a tinkerer in 2050 could use to blow up a planet? What if there’s a way to mess up the cosmic background vacuum locally and thus extinct ourselves? And so on. A huge pile of what-ifs.
Pretty sure the nuclei survived, or we wouldn’t have heavy elements like uranium or iridium, but I take your point. I just mean that if you believe the laws of physics are the same everywhere, then if you can send atoms, you can probably work out a way to get the atoms to the destination intact. If you can build an engine that can get a large vehicle up to speed, that engine should work at the other end to slow down. Etc.
Whatever mutations occur to give a species an advantage, are random. There are, presumably, a huge number of evolutionary events which didn’t give an advantage and possibly led to certain species being out-competed or out-predated. Evolution is not a one-way street leading to evermore complexity, sophistication, or intelligence.
Maybe I am misunderstanding your use of the term “evolutionary forces” but that seems suggestive of intelligent design.
In fact, selective pressures are not generically optimizing; they act as pruning forces eliminating branches of evolutionary development which are not robust for contemporary local conditions. The species that are most successful are often highly specialized, like insects or pandas; that same specialization may ultimately doom them to extinction when they are unprepared to adapt to radical changes in conditions or resources. The most adaptive species are bacteria and microscopic life, which can evolve rapidly due to their prolifigacy. Most large species end up either dying out or becoming stagnant as they are overtaken by less developed but more evolutionarily agile species, e.g. how small mammals and aves survived and thrived after the K-Pg event while the large dinosaurs went extinct en masse.
General problem solving intelligence has been an adaptive solution for a handful of diverse species such as some cephalopods, various marine mammals, covids and psittacines, ursines, probiscids, some unglates, and of course the great apes, but it is fairly recent in evolutionary terms and the most we can say about its success is that it has been independently developed (to a greater or lesser degree) and has been reasonably useful for most species and undeniably revolutionary for us. Lacking any data, I don’t think we can really say much of anything about how representative evolutionary development of life on Earth has been of typical development of hypothetical life elsewhere, particularly when it comes to bottlenecks like multicellularity, cellular specialization, sexual reproduction, et cetera. For instance depending on how life develops elsewhere it may depend more upon lateral gene transfer (or something equivalent) rather than sexual reproduction to increase variation. Cognition may be a collaborative activity networked through different organisms rather than being an individual capability, or may percieve the environment so differently that there is no comparison between human and alien cognitive functions.
All we can really say about alien life and hypothetical intelligence is that it is likely to be much weirder and unexpected than anything we can imagine. The science fictional conceit that aliens will be walking and talking humanoids with just funny bumps on their foreheads and a proclivity for impractical melee weapons is about as plausible as flying monkeyss and talking rabbits.
Well, as I was told in the next post, it seems to be an interesting side note to be explored since the actual OP question was answered. I don’t think that this tangent (to me) is relevant to the question in the OP (and I certainly don’t see any connection between the Drake equation or FP to a definitive indication or otherwise of past life on Mars, which was what I was originally responding too), since I don’t think that intelligence, especially technologically advanced civilization is part of some evolutionary plan for all life. I think it was pretty much a fluke on this planet, and based on the only example we have to go by, that being us, there were so many single points of failure that it was pretty lucky we got here. I think that will be the case in the wider galaxy and universe as well…life will be pretty common, intelligent life much less so, and intelligent life leading to highly advanced (or even not highly advanced) technological civilizations will be very rare. Personally, I think we will find evidence of past life on Mars (and several other places in the solar system), and perhaps even evidence of current life once we decide to send humans there to check it out. It WILL be interesting to see if there is some commonality between that life and our own or if it’s totally different.