Suppose the universe is teaming with life: how advanced do you think the human race is, relatively?

Great Debates
1

Let’s suppose that the universe is full of planets (or even other bodies, like stars) that have life on them. I realize that there is debate over what “life” refers to, but let’s tread over that debate and use a common sense definition: if Picard would consider it a “new life form” upon discovering it, it’s alive.

Now let’s invent the term alpha civilization to refer to the most advanced civilization to originate from a particular celestial body. So, humans would be the alpha civilization of Earth. If a planet had only one life form, that life form would be that planet’s alpha civilization, no matter how primitive (maybe they’re no more sophisticated than your average prokaryote).

Suppose that one had a list of all the universe’s alpha civilizations: how do you think humanity would rank among them in terms of overall sophistication? Define that however you want, I’m looking for open-ended discussion.

I personally think that we’d actually be fairly advanced: maybe in the 95th percentile or so. I do think that there would be more advanced alpha civilizations on the list, but I don’t necessarily think that great intelligence has any great long-term survival value. I imagine that somewhere in the universe exists at least one civilization of extreme complexity, but I don’t think that the universe is just flooded with fantastically advanced life.

Edit Note: I introduced the term alpha civilization to work around the fact that, presumably, the most advanced species or civilization would only be one of many other species or civilizations on the celestial body in question. For example, we already know that we are the most advanced among tons of other species that inhabit the Earth. I imagine it is possible for an advanced civilization to also be the only race on its home celestial body, but I doubt that sort of thing is common in the universe.

2

A lot of this depends on how you define advanced.

If, for example, we were trying to rank two species, let’s call them the Alices and the Bobs (because I’ve just read an article on cryptography), that are exactly the same in every way, except that the Bobs have far more wisdom. One day, the king of the Bobs, Bob the Intellectual (I’ve had a couple drinks, too) comes to the realization that if a certain type of technology were developed, the Bobs would go extinct in a thousand years. King Bob explains his theory carefully to the greatest minds of his planet, and manages to convince all of them that this technology should not be realized. The Alices, who have read and heard this argument, on the other hand, come to reject it, and develop the technology. Now imagine that it is seven hundred years later, and the Alices have made the technology work and it has served to inspire the creation of more technologies, and that it is fairly easy to judge now that the Alices have the better technology. However, at the same time, the timeline that King Bob said would happen if the technology were realized has been shown to come to pass for the Alices.

How do we decide which of these two species is more advanced? One of them, the Alices, is clearly more developed now than the other, but the reason the Bobs aren’t as advanced is that they are trying to avoid their own doom. Complicating the picture is that we, as humans, can’t know for sure if King Bob’s predictions will be true for the next three hundred years, even if seven hundred years of correct predictions of the former future history of the Alices is nothing to scoff at.

Now, let’s assume that the Alices and the Bobs are in fact completely identical, that is, they no longer have the superior wisdom, but only the “normal” amount, but the Bobs never develop this long-way-off-doomsday technology by sheer chance, while the Alices do? Does this change the relative ranking of the two species even if the technology each species has is the same as in the first scenario?

Another question I have just come up with is how to deal with change over time. Human society today is far more advanced than that of three thousand years ago, but genetically as far as I know, we are pretty much exactly the same. Would this affect the rankings of alpha species? Or would they be based on a sort of potential? or perhaps the rate that they advance over time would be the criterion?

This is just my $/50, as to the premises of the original poster’s question, and by this point I must thank you for reading it. As to answering it, I have no idea whatsoever where we would rank, not in the least because I don’t feel I have much of a place to start in guessing how intelligent aliens I haven’t met might be. On the other hand, if it is true, as I’ve read somewhere, it took multicellular life a long time to develop on earth, then perhaps most planets’ (or other sorts of bodies’) alpha species might be single celled, or at least, fairly low in the chain of evolution however that may happen elsewhere, than people are on earth.

3

Our ancestors competed with stronger and faster predators because they were smart. It certainly is a competitive advantage. Any animal that competes with us for a niche in the environment will lose in the end, because other animals aren’t smart enough to make their own food. We can protect ourselves from the bad parts of nature in ways no dumb animal possibly could. There is no doubt that any creature which competes with us has absolutely no chance to thrive, while the creatures that cooperate with us, our parasites, and the creatures we domesticated are thriving. We’re like a big hinge that the whole food chain swings from.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that any ecosystem with a reasonably stable environment for a long time will eventually lead to one smart dominant species, as it has here.

4

Three thousand years is not enough to expect to see major changes. That’s what, 120 generations, give or take? Go back a more realistic amount of time, say 50,000 years, and there are significant differences between modern humans and our ancestors.

5

If we define “advanced” by extant technology alone and not by potential technology, or something along those lines, then our ranking among the other alpha species may very well have changed quite a bit over just the past three thousand years. Granted, our “competitor” alpha species may have done the same thing, or some may have lost the resources to maintain their previous level of technology, or a thousand other things. There’s nothing wrong with the rankings changing over time, of course, but I was pointing out that the level of technology of a single species can vary significantly over time, even if the genetics and so on of the species itself isn’t changing much at all, or at least not nearly as quickly.

6

How many “alpha civilizations” are there? Well shoot, say a million? or add as many zeros as you think appropriate.

Given that we only invented radio a bit over a century ago, an “alpha civilization” that originated at the same time as ourselves but discovered radio 200 years ago is going to consider us as a curiously backward form of pond life. Those that started a million years ago won’t even recognise that we are an “intelligent” life form. The technology gap is exponential.

Probably much more than half the “alpha civilizations” won’t have learnt to bang the rock together. But whatever proportion have would rank us a ultra-low sophistication. Hell, we don’t even have the most basic intergalactic defence system.

The venerable Douglas Adams, a hoopy frood who sure knows his onions.

7

I’m pretty sure the people that study this sort of thing think it was more important that we started walking upright and could carry things, and that we lost our fur and increased our ability to sweat (on a hot day a human can travel further than a horse because of this), than that we were smart, to elude predation.

Something made our intellegence skyrocket, and pretty recently in geological time. Language? Memes? Nobody’s sure. But on an earth that is something like 5000 million years old, we still weren’t very human only 1 million years ago, and I bet fooling with genes or building robots is going to make something leaps smarter than we are today, probably in much less than 0.001 million years from now.

This means that on the timescale of the universe, creatures probably stay around our level of intellegence for the most fleeting of moments.

It is pretty unlikely that a life form at least as smart as we are isn’t way, way beyond us.

8

I would think, just based on Earth’s history, that evolution of our style of intelligence is rare.

How many incarnations has life on Earth gone through (between extinction events) without evolving intelligent life? Many times life has reached full fruition here with no human-level intelligence at all.

There is nothing inevitable about it.

9

Something to consider is what are the environmental factors that push for higher intelligence (as opposed to other methods of survival), and what are the limits of that pushing. If we knew that, we might be able to figure out the chances that an environment conducive to greater than human intelligence exists, maybe it’s frequent.

10

If they haven’t destroyed themselves with all that wonderful technology yet.
Something that humans have almost done a few times…and probably will in time.

11

I think theres a good chance we are most of the way to the top.

Lets look at our possible evolution from where we are now to some future time.

Are we going to have some massive breakthrough in poetry or storytelling or music or art that makes all the stuff done up to that point look meaningless and trite? I doubt it.

Are we going to be massively more “wise”? Most wise sayings we have now are OLD. I dont forsee any big breakthroughs in wise. A much larger fraction of us actually being wise? Hopefully. A much high level of wiseness? Don’t see it.

Morallity? Again, much of that stuff is already old. I think most of the possibilities have been fleshed out. I cant imagine some whole massive new field of morality being “discovered” making the current stuff childlike by comparision. The only advances I really see possible here is actually implementing our moralities to a larger extent or perhaps reaching a better consensus on what is or isnt moral.

Then we have AI. I don’t see it being a given. And even if we get it, having a very smart AI isnt neccessarily going to result in taking our species to the next level.

Then we have our technology. IMO its not invetitable that it will continue to advance to the point that it makes the stuff we have and use today look worthless.

Our knowledge of how and why the universe actually works. Again, thats cool to know and we may or may not get there, but unless that allows us to discover some loopholes in our general knowledge right now of how things work, its just gonna be some interesting information.

I think much SciFi has one aspect right. All those other guys out there are generally gonna be more at the “strange cousins with odd rituals with perhaps slightly better technology” end of the spectrum rather than “holy crap, they are technological/social/intellectual/moral Gods nearly beyond comprehension that make us look like damn dirty stupid apes” end.

Just an opinion with nothing to really back it up. And I hope I totally wrong about all of it.

12

The Earth was all bacteria and algae for most of its history. One can possibly conjecture that “complex” life that arose in the Cambrian explosion was a rare occurrence in the “Life in the Universe” game of chance, let alone a species growing a big brain and useful appendages (dolphins/whales lack the latter) for “doing stuff” with.

And then there is the fact that we are absolutely sucking the useful resources out of our rock…given the fact that a “warp drive” does not seem to be feasible in reality, I’m guessing most alpha civilizations that do develop in the Universe end up starving to death on a stripped planet like the Easter Island’s inhabitants on a grand planetary scale or dead from nuclear/biological warfare.

Happy post for the day. :slight_smile:

13

I totally disagree with that. We are amazed about cave paintings and art from 30.000 years ago, and that is with a direct comparison with the things that came later.
If we found an alien civilization that was only 100 years behind us on average, I would be awestruck. Even basic tool use like with some birds or sea otters etc would mean much more to me than “pond life”.
And even in a million years, reaching the moon for the first time will still mean something.

14

It’s kinda hard to rank ourselves amongst infinite unknown potential competitors. To a certain extent, continued survival is evidence of some degree of sophistication. On the other hand, failure to occupy more than one planet indicates limited achievement in technology and logistics as well as a serious strategic weakness. I guess we’re about average for a non-spacefaring race.

15

It depends strongly on the average lifetime of a technological culture. If most of them kill themselves off within 200 years of inventing atomic energy, we are pretty much on top. If the expected lifetime is thousands or tens of thousands of years, we are pretty primitive.

Technologically we clearly have a long way to go. Morally, we have come a long way from slavery and the sacking of cities, but a glance at the news will show you we have quite a ways to go. Artistically, our heritage improves with time, not because the average artist is better, but because there is more time for the rare geniuses, the Shakespeares and Beethovens, to appear.

16

Says who? We recognize australopithecus as intelligent, even with zero evidence of technology.

Also, there is no reason to assume technology advances are exponential. We have seen some periods of exponential growth, but just because we can look back a thousand years and see exponential technological progress doesn’t mean we can look forward and say the next thousand years will also see exponential technological progress. There are certainly theoretical limits to tech growth, and almost certainly practical limits as well.

17

Extinction events don’t wipe the slate and make you start again from 0. They’re just events that cause a bunch of stuff to die. Humans have survived at least two extinction events and we’re still doing alright.

18

It’s entirely possible that the Universe is teeming with life, and some planets have borne life much longer than Earth – but that this is still the only planet on which intelligent life has emerged. Look how long it took Earth’s biosphere to produce the hominids, after all – two billion years of evolution, at least, and of random experimenting with wildly different kinds of life-forms. And we might be an extremely rare fluke, cosmically. We have no basis to say whether we are or not.

19

I think it would rank very low.

OK, bear with me. My ability to manipulate numbers may be way off, so feel free to correct me.

  1. Humanity represents a tiny percentage of the period of time life has existed on Earth.

  2. The universe has been here for billions of years.

  3. Therefore our species’ existence is a teeny tiny flash-in-the-pan so far.

  4. Potentially we can go on for hundreds of millions of years (possibly more if we can leave Earth). Our existence so far therefore is only a teeny tiny minsicule dot at the beginning of our species’ lifespan.

  5. The probability of meeting another species which is in that teeny tiny miniscule dot of a percentage of its existence is… well, teeny tiny. We’re far more likely to meet another species in the remaining 99.999999% of its existence.

  6. So if 99.999999999% of the species we meet are NOT in the 0.00000000001% start of their existence, then 99.999999999% of those species are more advanced than us.

  7. Therefore we’re in the bottom 0.000000000001%.

Mathemiticians, feel free to criticize, correct, or admonish! :slight_smile:

20

Yes, I know. But the extinction event opens up all sorts of new niches. So there have been multiple opportunities for an intelligent life form to evolve into a niche. But it’s only happened once. It seems like the odds are against it.