We’ve had a fair few threads which demonstrate just how difficult it is to kill off humanity. Kill off 90% of people and you’ve only set humanity back 2 centuries.
Destroying humanity is one thing; destroying civilization is another. And destroying civilization is quite bad enough for most people.
And technology is improving; eventually, we will be able to destroy humanity or even all life on Earth. Anything from a Superflu style superbioweapon, a nanobot biosphere-eating plague, to a diverted asteroid.
Fortunately, I do think we are capable of learning restraint. Just read history sometime and ask yourself “What would these people have done with modern weapons ?”
We don’t really have a broad enough data set to be able to extrapolate reliably - we only know of one instance in which intelligent civilisation arose - our own.
But there are some things I think we can take as given, without being to anthropocentric:
-Evolution is a competitive process. Survival of the meekest just doesn’t seem likely.
-Some kind of tool use or technology will be required (even if it’s biotechnology based on some kind of auto-genetic-engineering in a hive civilisation).
-Some form of language and communication will be necessary.
So something needs to occur to provoke the selection/development of these traits… good candidate pressures seem to be:
-Avoidance of predators
-Hunting of prey
-Ummm… Hi Opal.
I do think it’s more or less a given that any dominant species will have clawed its way to that position at the expense of killing/eating, or killing/avoiding, many of the others.
The existence of a meek, nonviolent deer-descended technological civilisation requires the absence of anything that would take advantage of those meek deermen by eating them. That’s a heck of a niche to remain unexploited for such a long time.
Actually, as I recall there’s a kind of monkey, I don’t recall the name, that is very pacifistic for just that reason; “Survival of the meekest”, or at least the least violent. And lustiest; they compete by trying to outmate each other. It’s large for a monkey and lives high enough in the trees that a fall will likely mean their death, and also that they will be unlikely to be able to break their fall ( too heavy, thin branches ). Which means that monkeys that get into fights tend to go splat, which means they don’t ( or at least, seldom ) compete violently.
So what you would need is a situation where for an evolutionary time scale violence ( or at least initiating it ) leads to evolutionary failure; death or the inabilitiy to breed. Whcih is possible, but obviously hardly common in nature.
Although I’m reminded of Jame’s P Hogan’s Giants, who’s entire land based ecosytem, including themselves, were non-violent herbevores. In that fictional case, it was becase a species early in their planet’s history evolved an internal poison that nothing on that planet managed to evolve resistance to; which meant that carnivorism equaled death, and that any species with violent tendancies would rupture it’s poison-containing secondary circulatory system and die; so nothing on land evolved violent behavior. Who knows how plausible that is, but it shows one scenario that might be possible, although probably unlikely.
The’re also the theory that species often evolve by competing with itself. A deer doesn’t need to be faster than the bear chasing it; just faster than the other deer. And I don’t need to be the biggest and strongest in the tribe if I’m smart enough to talk bigger and stupider fellows to fight for me; which makes me more likely to survive and breed than the big and stupid guy who fights and dies instead of talking. The guy who can talk a woman into bed, the individual who convinces the tribe that he or she speaks for the Gods and you should give him food, the person who can tell that the trader from the next tribe over is pulling a scam, and so on are more likely to pass on their genes, one way or another; it’s sometimes called the Machiavelli theory of human evolution.
Agreed - I think any discussion here will have to be in terms of what is and is not more or less likely than something else - and even those things that are unlikely, are possible.
I agree it’s unlikely - a system that readily kills its owner seems like something there would be considerable selective pressure to discard or break at the first opportunity. Sure, something with a broken poison system would be vulnerable to predation, but a)at the beginning at least, there are no predators and b)it would freely be able to engage in violence to gain a competitive advantage for limited food resources, if not actually able to eat all the other poisonous animals.
Sure, but there’s a bear. Violence inherent in the system.
Some of that I think you could describe as non-physical violence, even the rest is pretty underhand and non-meek.
Intelligent, no. But successful, I’d have to say yes, it’s very likely. There’s a great short story by Bruce Sterling and the name escapes me, but it involved a swarm of interstellar insects hitching a ride on an asteroid, being observed by future human beings. The bugs are bugs, no smarter than animals. But through the course of the story, the bugs start preparing for the hatching of something new, which turns out to be a bug smart enough to converse with the humans. An evolved trait dependent upon an encounter with any other species, the ability to produce intelligence only when needed, and to not waste the energy at other times. It was a successful, spacefaring society that lacked any real intelligence.
I guess I can imagine an environment that would produce a dominant species that had no understanding of physical violence. But I don’t think it would be the norm. Nearly every successful species is likely to have clawed its way to the top of the food chain by using violence on its planetary co-inhabitants, and probably on themselves. Even if the space gazelle gets smart by running from the space lion, when it figures out gunpowder it’s sure to blast the living hell out of that lion.
So I think evolutionary success, defined as a spacefaring species, will necessitate an understanding of violence in the majority of cases. Intelligence may be optional.
It’s called The Swarm - great story, but a little bit fanciful in places.
I don’t see how you could have a space-faring species without the intelligence to build the transport. I know various evolutionary steps may well have been down to luck, but saying that a bunch of hardy anaerobic microbes blasted into space on a rock as the result of a meteor impact is ‘evolutionary success’ seems a bit of a stretch. Sorry if I’m missing your point.
If development of space travel technology needed co-operation between organisms, I would think that the non-violent tendencies needed for this would bode well for the friendliness of alien visitors. Not the case for cold-hearted, hive-minded alien craftspeople though.
I suppose it’s perhaps conceivable that a spacefaring species could arise without the understanding of how or why they were doing it, or indeed the capacity to think about it at all - after all, does a coconut tree understand that its fruit will float across the ocean to colonise other shores?
Okay, like maybe a gigantic bursting seed pod which spreads its seeds around the planet with enormous force, which eventually mutates to the point where its hardy anaerobic seeds reach escape velocity and whizz off to inhabit other planets? I suppose so.
I wonder if it’s possible to figure out how much intellectual capacity human’s have spent devising more efficient ways of killing each other?
I remember seeing a computer animation based on that idea, but that was more about the visuals than the concept.
Another approach that might work would be plants that produce some kind of very lightweight and durable spores that are initially distributed by wind currents - could end up competing for better distribution by going higher and higher into the atmosphere, until they get to the point where they could be whisked off in the solar wind or something.
But how would it achieve escape velocity? If it isn’t going fast enough it won’t get out of the gravity well and will just be pulled back down. It takes a lot of energy to escape a planet, and for an unprepared lifeform to escape accidentally, and survive both the exit and re-entry process to make it to another planet seems really unlikely.
Well exactly - it was only because of Mangetout’s reference to coconut migration that I was even speculating. The seed in this case would have to be amazingly hardy to survive escape/travel/reentry and also amazingly numerous to give them any chance of finding a suitable alternative planet. Plus the plant would have no evolutionary advantage in expending energy anywhere near that required to expel its seeds from the planet.
On a different matter, I’d find it quite hilarious if an alien race 20000 light years away had set out for earth at half the speed of light 10000 years ago, expecting to find a lush paradise, only to find the world overpopulated by warmongers, resources depleted, in the grip of global warming.
Actually, I think even dust-sized spores would have trouble re-entering an atmosphere without burning up, wouldn’t they?
Non-sentient animals display completely instinctive behavior of stunning complexity. Does the bee think about the hive it constructs? Does a beaver contemplate or appreciate its own dam? Doing things is about the doing, not the thinking about the doing. Last year I watched a wasp build one of those mud coccoons on my balcony. I watched it turn each time it flew away, hovering in mid-air to memorize the location of its works. Coming back to that precise location each time with more raw dirt represented a feat of three dimensional navigation of impressive complexity. Could I do the same, without error, if I had wings? Yet the wasp has nothing I would call a mind. I conclude that the limit of a species’ ability to do a thing is the propensity of instinct to compel the predicate behavior. Studying just the species on this planet, that is a propensity that may well be nearly infinite.
Measured against a human’s ability to conceptualize and adapt in its own lifetime, it’s paltry. But on a gentler evolutionary curve without aggressive intelligent competition, the dumb force of instinct could result in a staggering level of complex, potentially spacefaring behavior on the part of individual organisms that have no greater idea of what they are doing than a spider does when spinning its web.
But that’s all a hijack. Will they be capable of violence, intelligent or not? I think: highly likely.
If they were couched in a little capsule of foam, like alien Cuckoo Spit, they might be okay.
Part of the problem with non-intelligent development of spacefaring organisms is that the payoff delay is likely to be very very long in terms of the lifetime of individuals/generations - with plants colonising shores across the ocean, they started off by colonising terrain right next door and built up gradually. - I’m not sure that a similarly gradual path exists to space travel and without it (and barring complete accident), there doesn’t seem to be any reward-cycle or selective advantage for organisms that just shoot their progeny off into the void.
For that matter, it’s possible to conceive of an organism that doesn’t even consume other living organisms.
We need salt in our bodies, and salt isn’t an organism. Imagine a species that got all its nutrition from non-living matter. It may still need to be clever to avoid predation, but apart from that, what factors in its lifestyle would justify the metabolic expense of brainpower?
I have that same problem when I’m looking for a reward-cycle vis a vis human space travel. Hard to find a concrete reward there. Political will beyond the Cold War competition is hard to discern; perhaps some artifact of old European colonial expansion? I suspect that in itself was a manifestation of a deeper expansionist instinct: the species that reaches critical mass seeks to spread, it survives better and maybe thrives. Or maybe any species at the bottom of a gravity well that reaches the very top of the food chain will try for the outside just because by the time they got to the top of that chain, they didn’t know how to do anything else.
I guess my point is that space travel may not require an immediate reward cycle, or one at all. A drive for expansion can be bred into a species, as I suspect it will be in any sufficiently successful example. As for how an unintelligent species could identify distant points of light as legitimate points of interest, who knows.
(I don’t turn on my balcony lights at night though, brings out the cockroaches. Wouldn’t that be funny, a space cockroach that colonized the galaxy because it thought it was chasing after giant porch lights?)