What is there inherently about an elephant, say, that prevents it from being intelligent? It’s got a larger cranial capacity than humans. Its senses are the equal of ours in most ways, and better in some. It has nearly as much ability to manipulate objects, via its trunk, as we have with our hands, and the difference there is mainly that it only has one trunk.
It’s safe to say that there are some traits that all intelligent species have in common, but there’s no need for them to just be humans with funny makeup.
I disagree. First, evolution does not proceed toward anything. Intelligence is not a goal of evolution. Evolution is change. And our history of changes just happened to lead toward intelligence. Homonid intelligence has been fairly successful, but here on Earth it has not stood the test of time to see if it’s a long-term evolutionary advantage. There are many “non-intelligent” species that have lasted/been around longer than humanity or even all homonids.
We only have our one example (evolution on Earth). It would be quite arrogant/ignorant to assume our history is the only one possible.
Science is based on evidence and cannot make those claims. But, using current theories & math, some scientists (Hawking) say that backward time travel is probably impossible.
Assuming that other species has the technology (we didn’t for most of our history).
And even if they are more advanced than us, they’re still limited by the speed of light. Plus, there’s signal weakening/degradation over vast distances.
Plus, we’ve only been listening for a couple decades. Our “intelligent” species has only sent 2 deliberate signals plus some unintentional TV/broadcast signals over the past few decades. Our signals have only reached a handful of stars.
Having said all that…you’re not alone in that feeling. It has a name. Hmm…I can’t think of the name at the moment…someone’s Paradox. Anyone remember?
Well, I’d just as soon be wrong, it would be nice to see creatures like Alpha Centauri from DR WHO, who consisted of a sphere that was a huge eyeball mounted on a shower curtain with 6 arms sewn on to it, only two of which worked, and presumably a pair of legs. It was a combination caterpiller and EYE and reminded me of the New Wave group The Residents, who dressed the same way except they had tophats on. But all imagination aside, I did see a special on octopi. They had them in huge aquariums to see what they looked like and study their behavior and one day they noticed that some little crabs that were in another container were missing and their dead shells were in with one of the octopi. So they ingeniously mounted a camera to spy on the room, and sure enough the octopus climbed up out of its tank, actually slithered along the floor, chinned itself up by its tentacles into the crabaquarium, grabbed a crab or two and went back home! This is pretty intelligent. Next we’ll be hearing that he released his friends and shot it out with the professors on the way to the sea. Anyway, I’m impressed, still reeling with amazement at that creature climbing out of its tank and up into the next one. But after all I guess it was just food motivated. Still, one must not look a miracle in the mouth.
The Fermi Paradox. When you run reasonable numbers through the Drake equation you get quite a few civilizations in our galaxy. Even given very slow rates of spread, it should take only a few million years for a species to colonize the entire galaxy. So, why haven’t we encountered evidence of them yet?
As for the idea that aliens should look exactly like us: that is simply ridiculous. Well, we know that the vast vast majority of species are not intelligent, in fact there has only been one (or perhaps a few if you include cetaceans) species that is as intelligent as humans, and that is humans. But when you think about the potential possiblities of life, why should aliens look even slightly like humans?
There are a few principles at work. We can assume large brains. That implies sensory organs. It is likely that sensory organs will be clustered toward the direction of forward movement. We could call that cluster a “head”. It is very likely that an alien would not be sessile, sessile creatures typically have reduced nervous systems. What would a sessile filter feeder use consciousness FOR?
Perhaps intelligent aliens will have manipulatory organs, but perhaps not. We can easily imagine intelligent creatures without “hands” that use their brains for social organisation, language, and complex sensory perception. Even if we imagine a creature with a head, sensors, terrestrial, with manipulatory organs close to the head, why should that look like a person? Why not a racoon or an elephant or a raven or a parrot or an octopus or a koala?
Declaring that convergent evolution will make aliens look just like humans is simply a pathetic failure of imagination and an ignorance of how convergent evolution works.
That sounds right. Thanks!
Watching TV? Long live couch potatoes. 
If intelligent life could look like anything instead of like us, then why did I read in a book on evolution (not by a crank) in a respectable magazine that I can’t find that it could only look like us, and it had to do with hand development and even swinging through the trees had to be in the background. I must find this article or book. As I say, I would just as soon alien life didn’t look like us, as it would be more interesting. And why are science people so huffy about science, like religious priests defending science with the flaming sword of superior reasoning and their methods. This should be another thread, but I notice they often adopt a superior tone and lack a sense of humor or sense of fun, as if they were True Believers in the Eric Hoffer sense or the Fundamentalist religious sense. I feel it is better to be more like Geminis are supposed to be: very interested in science and in almost all other subjects just because they are interesting to them, not because they think their life or the fate of the earth depended on it.
If they couldn’t look like anything but us, then why did I read in a book I can’t find, either, that they probably wouldn’t? Seriously, don willard, if you can either find the title and author of the book, or present any logical arguments for why the hands etc. would have to be in the same places, then we’d all take you a bit more seriously. As for the typical attitudes of scientists and the statement that we tend to get dogmatic, feel free to open up a thread over in Great Debates to discuss that.
two quick points-
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don willard, dogmaticism is a human thing. people will get that way about anything. you yourself did it in this thread (I heard this from a higher source, so it MUST be right). Whatever. Yes, it does give science a bad name when scientists do it. No, not all scientists do it.
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all we can logically conclude about time machines is that they have never been patented.
jb
Don: Perhaps you’d find a better reception for your ideas on science of you didn’t BRING UP ASTROLOGY!!!
Look, even if somebody did write an article where they said that intelligent creatures would have to be the bipedal descendants of four-limbed mammalian brachiators it was simply speculation. And even then, we’ve got all sorts of room for variation. What sort of social structure do they have? Even among our closest evolutionary cousins, we’ve got a huge variation in sociality. Humans pair bond but live in groups. Gorillas live in harem groups. Chimps live in groups but don’t pair bond. Orangutangs are solitary. Gibbons live in territorial pairs. Even if they were 99% similar to humans physically (like chimps are), the differences could be immense.
The fact is that we have no idea what aliens would be like, since we have no idea what ANY life on other planets would be like. We have only one sample, Earth’s biosphere. Is life on earth a typical example of life in the universe? Well, who knows? It will probably be average in some ways, waaaaay off the scale in other ways (I bet earthlike planets with large moons are rare).
I’ve often speculated that the people of Jupiter would be like round flat pancakes because of the huge gravitational effects, and very large. They would have plenty of fur and would be plastered on the solid core of frozen methane ice and go about like snails. They would have huge eyes in order to see through the thick atmosphere. Those on Neptune, where they have such strong winds, would be like light sails and just sail around from place to place. They might have evolved like this from small cells getting flatter and flatter and larger. The Martians live inside the planet, of course, and have a shape like ours, only with huge eyes and thin bodies because they go through the dark tunnels a lot and it is cheaper to make the tunnels narrow.The Face on Mars, which scientists hate so much they won’t even allow anything to ever land near it, is ancient Martians’ idea of the ideal man, with normal eyes for instance. But the so-called pyramids are just chunks of rock and all those measurements among them which are supposed to be pi, e, and whatnot, are far-fetched.
So a method to your musings seems to be emerging, don willard. Humans are the ideal race. After all, the martians built a face that looks suspiciously like ours. Even without ever having seen us, the Martians intuit the way that intelligent life should look, which is exactly like us.
In such a complex and unknowable universe, why stick with rampant homosapiencentrism?
jb
The biggest impediment I see to backward (or frontward for that matter) time travel is that of place.
The earth is traveling around the sun, the sun around the center of the galaxy, the galaxy towards others in the supergroup (and who knows what else) at very great speeds. Not to mention the universe is expanding! If you ‘dissapeared’ for even one second and then re-appeared in the same spot, you would probably be millions of light years from the earth (I was too lazy to do the math, there are some unknown variables, and besides I think the point is taken). Not to mention we don’t know what effect the expanding universe would have - even if we did make it back we might be too small to see!
And,
Intelligence does not equal curiosity. The ‘smartest’ life in the cosmos might be content to set on the porch and watch the corn grow. Growth into the universe requires much more than smarts. The average Ethiopian is as intelligent as the average American, But I doubt if they are gonna put a man on the moon anytime soon.
Chronos, I’d be interested in your opinion about the ‘place’ problem.
Hmm…this assumes if you disappear that you “stand still”. Well, compared to what? I’m guessing that if you had a time machine, you’d have to specify a location to travel to as well as a time…
Um…I seriously don’t think there’s a conspiracy to avoid the “Face”. Feel free to send a spacecraft there. NASA made a point of it to take higher resolution photos of the Face with the Mars Global Surveyor…and as expected, it was not a constructed face…just a natural geologic formation. The Face only seemed that way due to the low-res Viking photo & the shadowing that happened to be there at that instant.
Here’s a close-up of the Face…
http://mars3.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/target/CYD1/index2.html
http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/4_6_98_face_release/index.html
When you see a face in the clouds, do you assume aliens created it? How about the “Old Man of the Mountain” in New Hampshire? Or the Old Man on the Moon? Or a dozen other examples. Humans look for patterns…especially those that are a reflection of ourselves.
This thread reminds me of a show I watched on Discovery last year. It was on dinosaurs, and they started talking about one that was supposedly smart as hell. And they had one theory that if the dinosaurs hadn’t been wiped out, this dino would have evolved to where we are as humans now. And then they showed a composite of what this dino would look like now, and they gave it a humanoid shape. So this brings me to my questions:
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Anyone else see this show? If so, could you refresh me on which one it was.
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Why did they give it a humanoid shape? What logic did they follow that says intel = humanoid? Just because we evolved that way means that if any other creature had taken over instead of us, they would have evolved into the same shape? I don’t buy that at all.
I’m sure the people who believe in the Face on Mars will still think this above photo looks like a face, and the others won’t. I think the Face on Mars in this photo looks like Santa Claus worn away a little.Also, how do the people who don’t like the Face on Mars explain how it is the only thing on Mars that looks like a Face? If humans have such a tendency to see pattern, then why don’t we see more such things on Mars or the moon? Mind you I don’t believe in those gnarled wood burls that are supposed to look like Jesus, because when I look at them they don’t.
Well, someone could take a photgraph of a gnarled wood burl from a certain angle, with part of the burl in shadow, and it would look like Jesus. That’s the problem with the Face on Mars. Repeat photos of this landmark don’t show a recognizable visage. But some people will insist it’s a NASA conspiracy just because the first photo looked like a face…
It’s not the only face on Mars. Here’s a smiley face…
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap990315.html
People do see a face on the moon. (both a man’s face and a woman’s face depending on how you look at it…I don’t have a link for this) (mind you, this is the face of the moon as viewed from Earth, not a particular structure on the moon)
Well, because all vertibrates have 4 limbs (at most - it some cases they have athropied to the point of nonexistance). And “evolving to where humans are now” means an ability to manipulate tools; thus long, flexible arms. Now if you have arms you need to stand upright, for balance. Voila! - you have a being with two arms, two legs, ahead, and standing upright. By definition, a humanoid.
Now, if dinosaurs had had six legs, it would be a different story.