Do the Meek Inherit the Galaxy? (Fantastic Article)

The good news, the Milky Way could be abundant in intelligent life forms. The bad news, we may never hear from them.

At last week's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego, California's top SETI scientists were asked how long will it be before we receive an interstellar greeting from an extraterrestrial civilization. Their estimates range from "minus 10 years" (it should have happened by now!) to 250 years into the future.

The most balanced guess in my opinion came from Seth Shostak: 25 years. This is based on the fact that the number of stars being reached in SETI optical and radio searches is growing exponentially with improved telescopes, signal processing, and detection strategies. This means that within the next two years as many stars will have been surveyed as have been in the past 50 years since the birth of modern SETI observations.

The SETI exponential slope can't steeply rise indefinitely. Statistically, your chances for success happen near the top of the slope, when it begins to flatten out. "If we don't have a detection by the year 2035 then something is wrong with our fundamental assumptions," says Shostak.

The Rare Earth hypothesis proponents say we'll never hear anything because the emergence of intelligence is an evolutionary crapshoot. We are likely to be the only sentient life in the galaxy.

If you find intelligent life once it's a miracle, twice, and it's a statistic. There is accumulating evidence that intelligent life has appeared twice on the Earth. At the same AAAS meeting the case was made that dolphins, whales and other cetaceans are so intelligent, they should be legally safeguarded as "persons" too.

Physiologically, dolphins have a brain architecture and brain mass-to-body mass ratio that is closer to that of humans than for any other species on Earth. Many years of experiments on captive dolphins show that they are self-aware, have a sense of self-identity, do detailed problem solving, interpret symbolic language, and exhibit empathy. Dolphins form complex societies with groups segregated by sex and age, alliances, and conduct long-term nurturing of the young.

Unlike apes, cetaceans are far-removed from humans in evolutionary time. Therefore human and dolphin brains have emerged independently and evolved very differently. Human and cetacean species have completely different cognitive abilities: one fine-tuned for surface dwelling, the other for life in the water.

If we accept the premise that two intelligent species arose independently on Earth, the inescapable conclusion is that evolution has tried, minimally, two pathways to intelligent life. This would argue that self-aware beings are a common evolutionary watershed on planets capable of sustaining multi-celled lifeforms for hundreds of millions of years.

Last week's tragic death of an Orlando Sea World veteran trainer by a killer whale underscores that we shouldn't subjugate the other intelligence creatures we share this planet with. The killer whale was captured in the wild, taken from its family pod, and housed in an enclosure as claustrophobic as putting a goldfish in a shot glass.

True, most dolphins and whales are bred in captivity and have contributed to our knowledge in a number of behavior experiments. But the price is premature death, self-mutilation, self-destructive habits, neurotic repetitive movements and aggression.

What is not compelling is the argument forwarded by Jack Hanna, Director Emeritus of the Columbus Zoo, in a recent CNN interview. He said that tens of millions of people are “educated” about sea life by watching dolphins and whales jump through hoops in the multi-billion dollar sea park and aquarium industry. If you want your kids to have a true appreciation of these creatures then go on a whale watching expedition in Vancouver Sound, and not to a pricey amusement park.

We have the hubris that because we can make guns, cars and refrigerators we are the superior species on Earth. But the reality might be that tool-making societies are inherently unstable and destroy themselves in a tiny fraction of geologic time.

Non-technological beings simply do not have a mastery of matter and energy to engage in the global destruction of their habitat. They cannot tip the checks and balances in a biosphere but instead live in harmony, as romanticized in the blockbuster sci-fi film Avatar.

Given these odds, I believe it is likely that the Milky Way galaxy is home to many more non-technological intelligent life forms rather than screwdriver-wielding opposed thumb creatures like us.

This would doom present SETI searches to a null result. Dolphins can't build radio telescopes. You'd have to physically travel to the home planet of non-technological intelligent beings and conduct observations in-situ.

For six months out of this year inhabitants of a pair of the small Japanese fishing villages will drive entire schools of dolphins into a hidden cove and slit their throats. The water turns red with dolphin blood, and the air fills with their high-pitched screams.

This mindless brutality worries me that nothing of our kind survives for very long in the galaxy. If we don’t receive an interstellar greeting by 2035 we may be left feeling as lonely an isolated in the universe as a killer whale cooped up in a holding tank.

Source

I found this article extremely interesting. I have presented this speculative position by Stephen Hawking that intelligence might not be an advantage in the long term. This article addresses the same point from a different perspective.

My thinking is this: I often think that intelligent life is much more rare than we would like to believe. I strongly believe that the universe is absolutely packed with life, but I am not convinced that intelligence is sustainable over the long term. Intelligent life forms are fairly sensitive; mega-disasters, natural or artificial are likely to wipe us out or nullify a good portion of our technological devlopment. It seems that we will really only get one shot at becoming an interstellar race. Our technology is based on resources which we have mined. We cannot access the deeper, more difficult to get to resouces, without using technology. If our technology gets wiped out, we cannot start fresh again and rebuild because we have already used up the substances that we need to build technology. It is not likely that after a mega-disaster we will retain the know how in a large enough percentage of the population to recycle the technology that will exist in a broken down delapidated state after a disaster.

So, I start with these premises:
1) We get one shot at becoming an interstellar race, and at the rate we are going the only thing that will stop us is a mega-disaster; natural or man made.

2) A mega disaster is inevitable. Meteor, mega-volcano, super-plague, nuclear, whatever... We know these things happen every so often, and we can be absolutely certain that it is only a matter of time before one of these things happens to earth.

Given these two premesis - which I think can be applied to all planets that have the potential for intelligent life(if they have the potential then it will happen eventually) - I think that what arises is an unstable equalibrium. Either the technological race progresses along nicely until the mega-disaster and then gets set back irreparably, or the technological race progresses along quicky enough that by the time the megadisaster rolls around they are able to prevent/minimize it. This test of the megadisaster will eventually occur for every intelligent race. Either they get sent back to the stone age perminantly, or they rise above and continue developing technology and eventually become interstellar.

I think that this progress or die point in the history of intelligent life is left out of the Drake equation. I think that if we include this term - by determining how often natural megadisasters occur and how likely it is that they species has the technology to avoid/mitigate the disaster - then we will come up with a real number for canidate planets for interstellar life; and I believe this number will be much smaller than current estimates.

I know my rant here is only tangentially related to the article, but I hope you find the thread interesting and I eagerly await your thoughts on the article or any of the above.

*And, if anyone wants to take a shot at estimating the values for mega-disaster rate and likelyhood of mitigation/prevention technology, and then including these values in a revised version of the Drake equation with reasonable estimates for all other values, that would be fantastically interesting to me. I will try it myself in the near future.

Regarding the article (not the OP's opinion necessarily) I understand trying to take this from a traditional SETI/scientific perspective. However, one thing always bothers me.

The very notion that an intelligent species from another world or dimension would make an effort to hide itself from being known would pretty much lay waste to all this brainstorming and speculation.

[edit on 28-2-2010 by bananasam]

If we momentarily accept that dolphins and humans are 'intelligent' beings then why would another intelligent being come and play with us?

Look what we do to dolphins?

It would be considered barbaric (unless the other race is barbaric in which case grab your coast you've pulled).

Perhaps once we've saturated the search for life on our own world with all the resources we've got then we might stand a chance of finding some elsewhere.

Only last year a whole microcosm was discovered within a dormant volcano, new fish are discovered all the time, bacteria are still being counted. This is with the ability to traverse almost everywhere on this planet with the latest technologies to hand.

To stand on this tiny rock, which we haven't fully explored, and claim to be able to shout across impossible differences to speak to...well goodness knows what...is a pretty big claim.

Time is as vast as the universe and it may be that many of our neighbours have had their full go at it (intersteller travel and all) and have simply came to the end of their existence. It may also be true that other neighbours of ours will come to being well after we've shot the coup.

Not an easy gamble to make that we're all around the same level at the same time.

When is the last time you talked to an amoeba?

What about an angel with vastly superior knowledge to yours talking to you?

-m0r

That is a great article. But it made me think that it's more likely that life is out there, just unlikely we will ever be able to communicate with them - it'd be like trying to talk to a dolphin with a walkie talkie, lol. I believe he is right about the two evolutionary directions. Creatures evolving like dolphins, to have a mastery of harmony with their environment, or us. The evolutionary direction humans have taken is very egoic, damaging, virus like. Just because we can invent technology does not make us necessarily smart of wise. In fact, we could be anything and we'd probably be very proud of ourselves and think ourselves so great.

S & F !!!

What a great article !

You tell it and make me look from another perspective.
My compliments for that.

Lets say we get Occams razor on this ?

I think this could very well be the easiest solution.

Thank you for posting it