Just until the next Chicxulub-like event happens. Humans are just the preliminary phase of the Age of Rodents.
The problem is that a bacterium or even a chimpanzee *can’t *willingly regulate their population to suit their environment. You need intelligence before you can do that. There’s no plausible mechanism for an unintelligent species to regulate their population to suit their environment. And if unintelligent species are somehow not competing, then there can be no driver to develop intelligence. An intelligent species can have no competitive advantage in an environment with no competition, and life will never progress beyond the first organism to arise, never mind evolving into an intelligence.
Earth is a planet is populated with organisms that rely only on inorganic chemicals for food/energy. We still have plenty of competition.
You are overlooking three vital points that mean that it is actually impossible to have enough of those chemicals to adequately sustain the growing population. The first is that population growth is exponential. The second is that evolution isn’t driven by competition, it’s driven by differential reproductive rates. The third is that there is never just one limiting factor on growth.
To give you a simple example, if I put two bacterial cells into a thousand litre tank full of nutrient broth, I have effectively created a planet populated with organisms that rely only on inorganic chemicals for food/energy and the planet has enough of those chemicals to adequately sustain the growing population. Nonetheless, within a very short space of time nutrients will become limiting because there will be more cells than the available amount of food. That may take hours or it may take years depending on temperature, but it will happen very fast. And even if I made a literal ocean of nutrient broth, we will see the same thing. An ocean full of nutrient broth with two bacterial cells added will become nutrient deficient due to bacterial growth within a hundred years or so. That’s point one at work.
But even if we keep increasing the size of the ocean and keep feeding in nutrients so that there was never a shortage of nutrients, we would still not solve the problem, because of evolution. Even with no direct competition, the bacterium that breeds faster will outcompete the others. If one bacterium has a doubling time of 1 hour and another has a doubling time of one minute, the first bacterium will come to dominate the planet. If one bacterium dies when exposed to UV light or high temperatures and one doesn’t then the resistant bacterium will dominate and so forth. Every time we double the size of the ocean, the faster growing bacterium will fill it up first, and double in size while the other bacterium remains stable. With no competition at all for resources, you still have competition for simple space. If all the space is occupied by the faster breeding species, then you have competition. That’s point two.
Which leads us to point three. Even if we have an ocean full of nutrient broth, some environments will be optimal. The surface waters of a tropical estuary will be warmer, they will have more oxygen, they will have lower osmotic potentials, lower UV light levels and so forth. If those are the non-nutrient factors that one lifeform prefers, then there will be competition to occupy tropical estuaries. Even if there is no advantage to killing another organism for food, there is a huge advantage in killing it to remove it from a preferred environment so you can live in it.
To stop evolution and competition, you don’t just need adequate food. You need infinite food because the lifeforms will rapidly multiply to exploit all the food available. And you don’t just need infinite food. You need infinite space. And you don’t just need infinite space, you need infinite uniform space.
And none of those things are possible in the real universe. Two of them violate the laws of physics and one of them violates the law of gravity.
What does “self-regulated population balance” mean? Do you mean that every single lifeform on the planet has made conscious decision to only produce a set number of offspring based on a decision made by a ruling committee? But that requires not only that every single lifeform is intelligent, but that they become spontaneously intelligent at the exact same moment.
That’s not plausible.
And if you mean that unintelligent species regulate themselves, well, that’s just impossible, As soon as one organism evolves to cheat it will occupy the entire planet, and then you will have a planet of cheating organism all competing with each other. A degree of interspecies cooperation is possible, but it mostly occurs where resources are limiting, not where they are abundant, and it can only occur in response to competition from other individuals.
Not just for sunlight, but for water, and nutrients, and pollinators, and heat, symbiotic fungi, and fire protection and protection from predators ……
As a result we have plants that are carnivorous, We have plants that parasitise other plants. We have plants that deliberately promote fire and plants that deliberately suppress fire. We have plants that develop thorns to protect themselves and plants that exploit the thorns of other plants and so forth.
I think that’s the point you are overlooking. Planets can not be uniform, thus something will always be limiting. Even with limitless nutrients, some other resources will always promote one individual over another
That’s just saying “What if magic”. Evolution is driven by competition, and any species that can evolve *will *become competitive. The two are inextricably linked. You can’t have one without the other.
How would you ascertain “homeostatic population balance” if not by the number of organisms that an environment can sustain? And if a species can sustain one more individual by forcing out one individual of another species, that is competition and it defines a new “homeostatic population balance”.
And you are overlooking that competition occurs *within species, not just between them. If one rhinoceros can produce more offspring than another rhinoceros by causing once buffalo to die, that rhinos genes will dominate the entire species in short order. At which point rhinos as a species *will be competing with buffalo.
You seem to be saying “We can avoid competition so long as each species can achieve maximum reproduction rate and survival rates without competition”. That’s tautologically true, but it’s just handwaving. How could it be possible for any species to achieve maximum reproduction rate and survival rates without competition?
It’s trivially true that you can find plenty of species that *don’t *compete with each other. But you are calling all black birds crows. A starling doesn’t compete much with a blackberry, for example. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t competing heavily with other individuals.
I think that you are making the common mistake of overlooking that the most fierce competition any organism faces is from its own parents and siblings. Even in a world with just starlings and blackberries, starlings would be facing lethal competition from other starlings and blackberries would be facing lethal competition from other blackberries.
You can’t just “expand on the model” of species that don’t compete with each other without also expanding on the fact that they are inevitably locked in competition with thousands of other members of the same species. That’s completely invalid.
No. If you can build a smartphone, you have the ability to build a rocket. You have now switched your position from arguing that they couldn’t to do it to arguing that maybe they wouldn’t do it. Those are very, very different propositions.
To a marine species, the air would be like the sea. They would no more need to build a missile launching submarine than humans needed to build submarines to catch fish. They simply need to build a boat or, even simpler, establish a shallow water “port” just as human did to launch their boats.
You would have to question how such a species wouldn’t have a long history of sending out land boats to hunt the land and mine guano, just as humans did for the sea. But of course on your world nothing hunts or mines because no resource sis ever limiting anywhere. Which makes the evolution of intelligence pointless, and hence impossible.
It’s hard to imagine. With no writing, only a very, very limited knowledge base is even possible. Basically, you are restricted to what one individual can remember and pass on. Mathematics is almost impossible. Brains just don’t work that way. While they can simulate the environment well enough to catch a bouncing ball, they don’t communicate the underlying mathematics to the conscious mind, and there is no reason they would.
If your brain somehow *is *communicating all this mathematics and knowledge to the consciousness, then the consciousness will realise the value of technology immediately. Stephen Hawking has less ability to manipulate the physical world than a dolphin, but he understands the applications of technology as well as anyone.
A dolphin with human intelligence may not be able build a car, but it could certainly pair of tweezers that it could use in its mouth. And that is the only tool it needs to build all the other tools.
But more importantly, if an organism is that intelligent, then the ones that are better able to manipulate their environment will outcompete the others, which will inevitably lead to the evolution of manipulatory appendages.
Fascinating? Yes. Always right? No.
This…
…and this.
And Blake is right, for the most part.
I agree. I was just throwing Dyson spheres out there as an example, but the point is we don’t see any known resources being seized.
This was in the context of the argument that even on interstellar scales there will be competition and only the strongest will survive. I was simply saying that:
-
Actually it’s not so simple, as any species with interstellar technology has likely left biological evolution long behind (as well as other likely differences) and
-
If we really were in a dog-eat-dog galaxy, that’s so saturated with life that resources must be competed for (and all species are trying to maximize their cut), we should see some evidence of that. If not Dyson spheres then something. Indeed we can look beyond our galaxy for evidence of that, and we don’t see it.
95% of the universe is dark energy/matter. IOW something that providing gravitational attraction. But we can’t interact with it.
IOW we know literally nothing about 99% of the matter and energy in the universe beyond the fact that it must exist but doesn’t seem to *actually *exist. That makes claims that we aren’t seeing anything consuming matter or energy resources very bold.
A total absence of 95% of the universe surely counts as something, doesn’t it?
For all we know, these interstellar empires could be harnessing 95% of the matter and energy in the universe, and that is what dark energy is.
It’s not a claim; it’s a correct observation.
Sure, we could tomorrow make some discovery that suddenly turns the light on and we find “Oh here is where all the extraterrestrial intelligences hang out”. Or, as you say, that such species are indeed harnessing great resources in ways we did not realize.
But that doesn’t make it invalid to point out that right now we have no evidence of any ETIs, not even disputed evidence, let alone a rat race of sentient species competing.
Your claim was, and I quote, "If we really were in a dog-eat-dog galaxy, that’s so saturated with life that resources must be competed for (and all species are trying to maximize their cut), we should see some evidence of that. If not Dyson spheres then something. "
To me, it seems that you arguing that there isn’t any evidence of vast amounts of matter or energy resources inexplicably disappearing in the universe. The kind of evidence of disappearing energy we might see if there were Dyson spheres everywhere. And if not Dyson spheres causing energy and matter to disappear then “something”. So if vast amounts of matter and energy resources aren’t disappearing, then there can’t be all this competing life.
But then when I point out that 95% of *all *the matter and energy in the universe *is *disappearing, you say that that is not evidence of something. You don’t say why it’s not evidence, but you imply that it’s because we can’t explain a way in which aliens would cause it to disappear.
That is a very bold claim when we live in a universe where we can’t see 95% of whatever makes up the universe.
The existence of dark matter may well *be *evidence of alien intelligences. The fact that we can’t correctly interpret the evidence or explain the evidence doesn’t make it not evidence.
It seems like you are saying that there was no evidence of gravity before Newton, which seems ludicrous. If there was no evidence, then how did Newton deduce gravity from the evidence? But if the evidence had always been there, and nobody had been able to correctly interpret it, then it is no different from dark matter being evidence of advanced ETs.
And, at this time, there is not.
95% of the energy is not disappearing. I think you’ve misunderstood the concepts of dark matter and dark energy.
And of course they are evidence of something, but in the context of what I was saying something was referring to some data supporting the hypothesis that we’re in a rat race galaxy of competing sentient species.
If we went by your understanding of what evidence is, then every hypothesis imaginable has evidential support.
Ghosts exist? Sure, they are responsible for the phenomenon of sonoluminescence. Since we don’t understand sonoluminescence yet, how can you be so arrogant as to say it is not supporting data. And so on.
Fire consumes and propagates.
Assume peaceable alien fire visits us. We send those rabid alien-killing xenophobes, firemen, out to kill them off. If only we had seen the sentient code in those flickering flames offering friendship, trade, and cultural exchange before the water murdered them!
Old thread I know. But the focus on human level intelligence as the definition of intelligence is funny to me. I would think the leap from a cat to a human in intelligence is far less then the leap from bacteria to a cat. Meaning, once central nervous systems developed, it was just a series of accidents. But the jumps between life starting, multi-cell, and central nervous system are the great filters. The difference between a cat and a human are minuscule.
I guess my non coherent point is, if we ever discover a planet filled with cats, we are not even remotely alone, lol
Firstly, who was focusing on human intelligence? I can’t find that in the thread.
Secondly, I would tend to agree with you that I doubt there is a great filter between cat intelligence and human intelligence. However, we don’t know that. It’s absolutely possible that that’s the great filter. If we knew where the filter was, that would be the end of the paradox.
I think 2040 is fairly realistic in the context that by that time humans will have traveled to Mars and maybe somewhere else in our solar system like Europa and might find - something. It might only be fossils but it might be a living organism but I’m betting they will find something.
ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.
- Arthur C Clarke, 2010
Just saying, the Fermi paradox asks “where’s everyone at?”, cat’s won’t answer, but the intelligence between an answer and a non answer is insignificant
Only in our human minds, developed by the same processes that brought about cats, is there a difference.
Yes; one speculation is that chlorophyll doesn’t utilize green light because it needed to rely on the purple light reflected by early bacteriorhodopsin photosynthesizers.
But even primitive bacteria rely on heavy metals. The active site of decollagenase is a zinc ion. Several important proteins use iron. Several other metals are essential for some bacteria. This shows not only the utility of supernovae for life, but how amazingly complex life is, with special enzymes configured to capture ions of manganese, zinc or whatever as they happen to wander by.
We really do not know how easy it is for a soup of RNA and amino acids to develop into complex life. It may be much more unlikely than many assume.
We have detected life in our own solar system; indeed it is extremely complex life. What we’re still looking for are signs of intelligent life. 
I still don’t get your point.
The fermi paradox asks why it is that we have not yet detected evidence of advanced life; there is no concrete reason we are aware of why there could not be even *millions *of advanced civilizations. So why don’t we see even evidence of one (where “advanced” means more advanced than us)?
People often get the Fermi paradox the wrong way round: they think that if they can think of a plausible reason why we don’t see ETs then that’s it solved. But there are lots of relatively plausible reasons, and the paradox is more asking: Which one(s) are correct? Or if, indeed, our list of candidate explanations includes the correct one.
In terms of your discussion of cats, I first thought you were just suggesting that the great filter cannot be between humans and cats. I would agree that the filter is unlikely to be at that stage, but we don’t know enough to rule it out.
But now you’re implying the universe may have planets with species at the cat level, but none at a human level: this would imply the great filter is between humans and cats.
So…what is it you’re saying?
Ok, I guess I’m implying that the great filter is after humans if one subscribes to the belief that one species is superior to another.
Further advancement in technology or biology inevitably can only lead to more introspection until technology and evolution stagnate. I can’t imagine any other outcome.
As far as the universe is concerned though, we’re all just silly cats with silly toys.
Judging by current human technological progress, any other technological species will develop a digital inner world of fully immersive virtual reality, before being able to engineer self replicating probes, or the resources necessary to send generational starships to amount to much galaxy wide colonization. Why go anywhere, if you can experience anything imaginable at home? Hell, my nieces could care less about having a driver’s license.
Kardeshev scale is so 1960’s.