Why are you assuming that mammals can develop higher intelligence but dinosaurs can’t?
The evidence of our existence and what we know about the universe indicates that there are plenty of other intelligent species scattered through the cosmos each wondering whether there are any others.
I made no such assumption, I said “may have never”, not “could never”.
But, based on the differences in brains between mammals, reptiles, and birds, mammals do have brain structures that those other classes do not. Whether those are absolutely necessary for higher intelligence, or whether something similar could be developed is an open question that would require a time machine and much patience to explore.
Also, the age of dinosaurs was nearly 200 million years, and they didn’t do much with it. The age of mammals has only been 65ish million years, and here we are.
So, given what we do know, it is reasonable to speculate that dinosaurs would not have advanced intellectually or technologically, but their existence would have prevent the rise of mammals, who we do have evidence of producing intelligent species.
If the universe is infinite, or at least really really big, then absolutely. But, if the nearest one is relatively contemporary in time, but is in a galaxy 3 billion light years away, then they will continue to wonder that, and never encounter other intelligent life.
If there were thousands of civilizations in our Galaxy, we would know it. With thousands of civilizations, there would be some that were enough earlier than us, and expansionist enough, that they’d already be everywhere. It’d only take one.
And yet, there are birds without those brain structures, and which yet have intelligence comparable to the smarter mammals (other than us).
Also, one general point about scientific puzzles: There are two kinds. When we observe something to be true but don’t know how it’s true, that can mean that we can’t think of any explanation, or it can mean that we can think of multiple explanations but just don’t know which one is true. The latter kind is much more common, and that’s the category that the Fermi paradox falls into.
That dinosaurs don’t appear to have evolved high intelligence in all that time is most likely because they didn’t need to in order to survive. Neither did the early hominids, and even the much-vaunted homo sapiens were essentially indistinguishable from many other mammals until just a few hundred thousand years ago, with many of the enabling mental faculties less than a million years old. Meanwhile we have evidence of avian brains being more capable than we thought.
As an aside, one of the dinosaur books I had years ago had a fascinating speculative picture at the end of what a typical dinosaur might have looked like if they had lived on and developed human levels of intelligence. It was very well done and one of the most haunting pictures I’ve ever seen. I wish I could find it again.
I fully agree, and I do feel that there would need to be some sort of fine tuning for there to be alien space faring civilizations, but none that would do things that would be obviously noticeable to our level of technology, which is why I am in the “we’re the first” camp.
And maybe if us mammals die off the birds will get a chance in a few tens of millions of years. They were the survivors of the wiping out of the dinosaurs, just like mammals. They’ve had the same time to develop as we have. I still don’t see any evidence of episodic memory or the ability to create novel plans for the future in their behaviors.
I agree, we don’t know which solution to the fermi paradox is the right one, but IMHO, it is narrowed down to either civilizations wipe themselves out before making a noticeable presence in space, or we are the first. The rest require too many unsupported assumptions that cannot be determined until we actually go out and personally look under all the rocks of the universe (or at least galaxy) to see where life is, or for the galactic civilization to decide we are ready to stop actively hiding and to contact us.
I wrote a short story a few years back in a setting that solved the fermi paradox by letting people travel to the past in alternate universes, and so there was never any need to go off planet for resources or room. That’s a possible solution, but that’s the sort of solution that I do consider to be relegated to sci-fi.
As has been said, intelligence is not necessarily something that evolution is “going for”, but is only developed if there is a need. One more reason why I see intelligent species as being very, very rare.
Did it have feathers?
I wonder if you mean Dale Russell’s ‘Dinosauroid’?
Certainly fascinating, but far too humanoid for my taste. A sentient biped dinosaur would probably have kept its tail for balance.
We have no way of knowing this. The galaxy is a very big place. We have no way to know what challenges there are when civilization reaches the next level. We have no idea what motivates any of these civilizations. We don’t know whether we are extreme outliers along any number of dimensions. Perhaps we are one of the rare civilizations that even care about this kind of thing. Perhaps our outlier is the combination of tool using and living on a planet that gave us access to easy concentrated energy sources that could kick off advanced technology.
There have already been many civilizations on Earth, and many of them stayed in relative stasis for a very long time. The Egyptians, the Chinese, the Romans… All made advances in quality of life, but the industrial revolution took thousands of years to get started. And we are all humans with much in common. We have no idea what drives species that may evolve elsewhere. Maybe only one intelligent civilization in a thousand even cares enough to try to get off their planet.
The future is a sea of unknowns. Because we can only see the knowns, it gives us an illusion that we are on the cusp of knowing everything. Then we learn something big, and tell ourselves that NOW we know everything. There were physicists in the early 20th century who thought we were very close to a complete understanding of the natural laws. Then we discovered relativity. Ok, NOW we almost completely understand. Then came Quantum mechanics, and the standard model. We found the Higgs Boson, and people started talking about finally understanding it all once we lick quantum gravity. Then complexity theory, information theory, and other radically different ways of looking at natural phemenon have come along and are upending the way we think about complex issues.
It is crazy to make categorical statements about civilizations we don’t have any knowledge of, or to make sweeping statements about the nature of a galaxy containing 100 billion stars that we have only been able to study carefully for a few decades.
What we do know is that there doesn’t seem to be anything special about us or our location. We should therefore assume it is likely that there are more civilizations out there. Probably a lot of them. Why we haven’t seen or heard from them is a mystery, but that shouldn’t be a surprise given how little we really know.
Except we have no evidence one way or the other for the prevalence of “need”, which may be very common. IANA biologist but if species diversity is a common attribute of life, then challenges to survival may come from competition for scarce food or other resources, or it may come from environmental stresses, or competition from within the same genus or even species.
I wish I could say it did, but it was a long time ago and I think predates the prevalence of the feathered-dinosaur theory (though I’m not sure it’s believed that they all had feathers). My recollection of the general impression is of human-like intelligence while looking very, very alien and more reptilian than avian.
Could a cold blooded creature even develop sentience? The brain requires a lot of energy and requires a lot of heat dissipation. I’m not sure that’s compatible with a cold blooded anatomy.
Note that all the descendants of theropod dinosaurs that are alive today are warm-blooded.
Can’t be too common a need. Life made it on Earth for billions of years before ever developing it, and if we are honest, things would probably be much better on earth (for all the rest of the species) had we never developed it.
I do work in a technical field (rocket propulsion and spacecraft systems) but what I’ve presented in posts above is not so much original ideas as largely just a brief survey of the current thinking in astrobiology and cosmology along with some cautionary discussion about speculation from an all too restrictive view of how extraterrestrial life and intelligence could develop and what it might look like based on the assumption that it would necessary be analogous to terrestrial life and intelligence. One particular assumption is that life and conditions on Earth represents a mean with a relatively narrow band of favorable conditions for the development of life and habitation even though we can observe the essential materials for life everywhere (e.g. emission lines of amino acids and other hydrocarbons) and have found environments even without our solar system that could potentially host life, albeit only the very extreme forms of life from Earth.
Even “thousands of civilizations”, if spaced evenly, would be vastly spaced from one another. If one drew an envelope around the galaxy it would encompass nearly 8 trillion light years; if there were ten thousand evenly spaced concurrent civilizations centered around an individual system, each one would be over 16,000 light years from one another. Even assuming that each civilization would develop the capability to travel at a speed of ~0.1⋅c, it would take more than three times the entire duration since the appearance of modern humans to travel that distance, over which time a society would certainly change and likely radically. (Given the accelerating pace of change of human society since the beginning of the Industrial Age and the potential for radical modifications of biology which are likely to become available before the end of this century, I wouldn’t wager a guess on what human society will look like in a thousand years, or even five hundred, much less dozens of millennia.)
The assumption that any suitably advanced alien civilization would build large observable macrostructures or vast galactic empires seems to be firmly rooted in an expansionist view of civilizations; that of course a space-fairing species would devote itself to collecting all available energy or creating interstellar communication networks, because that’s how Columbus did it, that’s how America does it, and it’s worked out pretty well so far (with apologies to Tony Stark). But in fact, in practice macroscale engineering projects even on Earth using conventional materials and established engineering methods end up being quite challenging and often fail to achieve their intended use without expensive and constant maintenance (see John McPhee’s The Control of Nature for examples thereof).
It may well be that celestial macroengineering projects are simply too large and complex for any theoretical benefit they might provide, and unnecessary for a post-scarcity civilization which can find ways to make their society smaller and use less resources per capita rather than ever increasing in size and scale to an unmanageable degree or building vast, star-enclosing structures. A civilization spanning thousands of light years, limited in communication by the speed of light and the bandwidth of whatever medium they transmit through is almost certainly untenable as an organized society. In general, the notion that societies need to expand in number because “…the more people we have to either push the boundaries of knowledge and thought,” only holds true as long as intellectual capability is a random distribution; a species that could self-select for intelligence, or more likely build a “synthetic intelligence” which is optimized for understanding natural phenomena and expanding knowledge, doesn’t need to bear billions or trillions of individuals just to pick out the few really gifted scientists and philosophers from the long tail.
The reason we’ve built societies based upon geometric growth of population has nothing to do with harvesting the few brilliant intellects (and in fact, such intellect is as often treated with disdain); it was for bodies to perform labor, first in fields and then in factories. With efficiency and automation, the utility of such a vast population of workers becomes a liability, which is a progression we’ve already seen in practice on multiple scales. In 1943, it took hundreds of physicists and thousands of human “computers” with adding machines to make the simplest calculations of nuclear criticality; today a moderately gifted junior high school student could do the same work and with greater accuracy and reliability on a smartphone or cheap laptop computer.
Thermoregulation is certainly crucial to mammalian (and avian) cognitive physiology as evidenced by the fact that some of the first symptoms of hypothermia and hyperthermia is impaired cognitive and nervous function. However, cephalopods, many species of which have demonstrated problem-solving intelligence at least on the order of domestic canines, lack inherent thermoregulatory mechanisms and still managed to function regardless. Of course, the development of cognitive capabilities in cephalopods is almost completely independent from that in vertebrates–neither likely had much more than a set of clustered nerve ganglia prior to the branching of that clade, and cephalopod nervous system is very different from that in ‘fish’ (tetrapods vertebrates, including all aves, reptiles, and mammals) and often very different even in comparison between species of octopus, squid, and cuttlefish, with a highly distributed network of neurons and wildly varying cortical structures as compared to the generally similar overall layout and evolutionary progression of all vertebrate brains; even mammals and aves, with quite different details, have a recognizably similar overall organization.
Any speculation we might make about extraterrestrial intelligence should start from the basis that their form of intelligence and structure of their ‘cognitive hardware’ and resultant perception of the world will be dramatically different from our own, likely to the point of making actual communication beyond the most trivial concepts exceedingly difficult, and possibly even essentially impossible without some kind of adaptive machine intelligence. Even the scale of time at which we perceive the world, and the way we conceive of it in discrete chunks is far from guaranteed to be a common basis. We experience the world on the scale of tens of milliseconds, and it takes us about a quarter of a second to formulate a comprehensive ‘picture’ of our immediate experience even if we are in familiar surroundings. (In order to compensate for the slowness of our nervous system, our brains actually do a lot of prediction based on experience and interpolation, which is why we can make out sentences even if letters or whole words are missing, and why optical illusions can fool us even when we are aware of them.) An alien intelligence with a different neurological basis might perceive the world in single milliseconds, or alternatively in minutes or hours, which would make not only a conversation but even a basic perception of the world very different. And it is often assumed that we can use some of the fundamental constants of mathematics such as e, i, π, ρ, and integers a kind of Rosetta stone, but what of an alien intelligence that does not see the world in whole numbers but rather in continuous distributions or some even more bizarre conception of mathematics?
I hesitate to engage on the side topic of asteroid mining because it really has nothing to do with the so-called “Fermi Paradox” but I do feel compelled to point out that much of the iron used prior to the invention of the blast furnace and virtually all of the platinum group materials up to the modern day that we mine from the Earth’s crust are actually from meteorite sources. Although the necessary technology and infrastructure to extract metals from asteroids will be very expensive to develop (and despite images of human ‘miners’ zipping around with jet packs using laser drills, would actually be heavily dependent upon automation to the point of requiring very little human physical labor) the amount of resources it could make available would be enormous in comparison to the thin shell of material we could potentially extract from the surface of the Earth, and without the consequences of polluting Earth’s biosphere with residues and processing byproducts.
However, all of this would just serve to depress the value of supposed “precious metals” and from an economic standpoint does not make sense by itself; the reason to extract resources in space is to process and use them in space rather than hauling up materials and finished goods from the deep gravity well of Earth. To that end, the most valuable mineral resources from asteroid sources are actually the most common; water ice and carbonaceous chondrites, which can be used for consumables, propellants, and structural materials. Steel, nickel, and other precious metals and so-called “rare earth” materials are nice to have for specific applications, but in terms of raw mass there is plenty that can be readily captured and processed using little more than concentrated sunlight and centrifugal chambers, provided you have the essential infrastructure and propulsion technology to capture and move masses around.
This still doesn’t mean that an advanced technological civilization would dedicate itself to making a giant buckyball structure or a whipping ball of yarn around a star that could be seen by observers thousands of light years distant or would for some inexplicable reason try to send material from one star system to another in more than minuscule amounts in the form of exploratory autonomous probes. The most interesting things that are to be discovered in the universe are likely at the very smallest fundamental scales, and the means to do so is more about volition than grand ambition:
“O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”[RIGHT]–Hamlet, Act II, scene ii[/RIGHT]
Stranger
I think I have or had that book also. No feathers for sure. I seem to recall it looked a bit like the raptors in Jurassic Park, though it predated that movie.
I know exactly where the book is - in the house I lived in 20 years ago. Now it must be in a box. But I can confirm your recollection.
It does surprise that octopi have high intelligence despite living at temperatures that are low and non-constant. But consider this research:
But, returning to thread topic, I wonder if sea-based life, however intelligent, has more trouble developing advanced technology than land-based life has.
Marine-based life would certainly not develop the kind of technology that we have developed; for one, fire is essentially impossible (or at least would require some kind of solid state oxidizer), and the sort of iron-based tools and structures is unlikely to say the least. But life that evolves in liquid water or a liquid hydrocarbon medium may find other ways to modify their environment such as directly controlling chemical reactions via selective emission of enzymes or other catalysts. The biggest ‘problem’ with sea-based life is that it may find it as difficult to adapt to a terrestrial environment with an Earth-like atmospheric density as we would to live unprotected on the surface of the Moon, or may not use vision in a way that allows them to perceive the wider universe beyond their world or planetary system, and thus, it would be difficult for them to develop the interest in exploring beyond their environment regardless of any native intelligence. But if intelligent life does exist, I would guess that it will be even stranger than our most ludicrous imagination, especially if it is based on something other than CHNOPS biochemistry or evolved outside of a planetary environment.
Stranger
The current prevailing idea is that some did and some didn’t, based on the evidence currently available.
It still seems a bit odd to me. Imagine a T-Rex adorned with blue feathers. Beautiful plumage!
In probably your lifetime or your direct parent’s lifetime, give or take (I don’t know your exact age), VTOL aircraft were first produced in significant numbers. Apparently it wasn’t until 1942 that the first semi-mass produced helicopter was released, with 132 built.
And yes, breathless predictions were made of personal VTOLs for everyone. By people who weren’t credible. Who made these predictions? Was it a committee of our civilization’s best educated people or some random garage inventor or news anchor or sci fi author trying to sell a book about the near future?
Well those predictions didn’t pan out. As it turns out, it’s really hard to fly any VTOL aircraft, and really expensive to make the kind of components you need for the extreme performance needed to get that T/W ratio over 1.
Oh, but these days it* is* starting to come true. Just a mere few decades late. Since we have figured out ways to make them computer controllable (a combination of better sensors and algorithms and a simpler mechanical design that is easier for a computer to control) and to use mass produced electric motors and batteries to build them.
Now even I’m skeptical. I think it might be many more decades away before flying cars are really prevalent. But considering how long it took humans to develop agriculture or writing, this is downright blazing fast.
Now even I’m skeptical. I think it might be many more decades away before flying cars are really prevalent. But considering how long it took humans to develop agriculture or writing, this is downright blazing fast.
This is why I stand by seemingly “absurd” predictions of advanced AI and self replicating robots. Because the math says they work. The real world practical examples, of modern factory robots with superhuman dexterity and vision, tell us that the mechanical part is totally feasible. And we keep cramming ever more ridiculous amounts of computing power into cheaper and cheaper microchips. (it has been leveling off recently but there’s still 3d …)
And there are certain enormous advantages even a simple AI, with nothing like the sophistication of human neural architecture, enjoy. Millions of years of experience (from a pool of millions of robots all sharing experience). Not dying from old age. A mind that is stable and doesn’t make cognitive errors. We’re working on AI architectures that will be able to do baysian reasoning on everything they learn and they will create correct rational models of what they expect to happen when they take actions. With a million years of experience to train the model. Plus simulator time.
You would reasonably expect this kind of AI, for the limited domain tasks it would be doing (assembling stuff in factories, resource gathering, even medical diagnosis and probably even high speed surgery) where the environment gives consistent and objective feedback, will very rapidly blow past human performance. In the same way that Google has always been, even when it was just a few computers in a college dorm, more knowledgeable of indexed text corresponding to keywords than any human being who has ever lived.
How does this relate to the Fermi Paradox? Because a civilization with “only” self replicating robots, some advances in medicine you can make if you have millions of medical research automated test labs you could make if you had the robots build them, and AI agents to drive these robots would be able to easily spread to the stars. Robots with superhuman dexterity that are almost perfectly optimal in their decision making wouldn’t have any trouble mining our moon for the ores needed, or building all the countless pieces of machinery you would need to construct and fuel an anti-matter fueled starship.
And with better medical tech (aging -> off. Periodic regenerations and organ replacements) even meatsack humans *could *probably spread to the stars, though I would say *that *prediction is science fiction.