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  • A Reason for Being Alone

    From John Savard@21:1/5 to All on Sun Aug 24 05:42:21 2025
    Are we alone?
    This has been a question that has often been asked. Given that so many science-fiction stories feature encounters with alien beings, it's an
    important question for science fiction.
    A while back, a book titled "Rare Earths" made the news. Its bold
    hypothesis was that in a typical galaxy, there was only a narrow ring in
    which solar systems would have enough heavier elements so that planets
    which could bear life could form, on the one hand, and those planets would
    not be so constantly pummelled by asteroid impacts so that it could never
    get past the stage of single-celled microorganisms.
    While there was certainly some plausibility to its arguments, this sort of argument is... too contingent for my liking. That is, it seems to me that
    it's entirely possible that if some facts were overlooked, it could turn
    out to be mistaken.
    But it seems to me that there is an argument - and, in fact, a fairly well- known one - that the kind of life that writes books and builds spaceships
    is indeed very rare in the Universe.
    How did human intelligence evolve?
    Our big brains have a high metabolic cost. And while human intelligence
    has obvious survival benefits... _now_... it took time for us, with our
    large brains, to develop all this technology that we now have.
    It seems quite unlikely that our large brains yielded enough in the way of *immediate* benefits to permit them to evolve in the face of their
    metabolic cost.
    This question was faced at a _very_ early stage by biologists studying evolution.
    Charles Darwin, after _The Origin of Species_, went on to write a second
    book on evolution, with the title _The Descent of Man, or Selection in
    Relation to Sex_.

    And so we've known *all along* that the giant brain of Man came into being
    to facilitate social interaction among humans... and thus this giant brain
    came into being through the same process as the tail of the peacock or the horns of the Irish Elk.

    And, since the targets of sexual selection are essentially random - we
    wouldn't expect creatures with giant horns like the Irish elk to
    necessarily exist on other planets, or creatures with tails like that of
    the peacock - it reasonably follows that far from being a common and
    inevitable result of evolution if it has time, brains of the kind needed
    to venture out into space... are likely to be rare indeed if they're just
    one random choice out of so many that sexual selection might happen to
    enhance.

    John Savard

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  • From John Savard@21:1/5 to John Savard on Sun Aug 24 09:54:13 2025
    On Sun, 24 Aug 2025 05:42:21 +0000, John Savard wrote:

    While there was certainly some plausibility to its arguments, this sort
    of argument is... too contingent for my liking. That is, it seems to me
    that it's entirely possible that if some facts were overlooked, it could
    turn out to be mistaken.

    On further reflection, I realize that my reasoning was mistaken, and that intelligence is likely a product of sexual selection is not one of the strongest arguments that we are alone in the Universe, or nearly so.
    A friend of mine recently got a fish with very colorful fins for her
    aquarium.
    So the tail of the peacock is not entirely random: the products of sexual selection fall into certain common patterns. Things that enhance social interaction could be one of those patterns.

    John Savard

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  • From Stefan Ram@21:1/5 to John Savard on Sun Aug 24 10:05:56 2025
    John Savard <[email protected]d> wrote or quoted:
    A while back, a book titled "Rare Earths" made the news. Its bold
    hypothesis was that in a typical galaxy, there was only a narrow ring in >which solar systems would have enough heavier elements so that planets
    which could bear life could form, on the one hand, and those planets would >not be so constantly pummelled by asteroid impacts so that it could never
    get past the stage of single-celled microorganisms.

    I had come across different stories about unlikely twists in the
    history of life, the kind where if they had not lined up, there
    might not have been any life at all. I never got around to laying
    all that out in a way others could follow, but it left me with the
    sense that life might be more improbable than the sheer number of
    planets is large. I think it is possible that life on Earth is the
    only life there is. But since there are stretches of the universe
    we will never be able to see, we will never know for sure.

    On Earth, not only did life show up, but out of life
    came consciousness, which is still a huge mystery!

    What hardly anyone considers is that there could be other phenomena
    on the same level as life and consciousness. Things we do not even
    have words for. Or, as a Secretary of Defense once said:

    |As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know
    |we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say
    |we know there are some things we do not know. But there are
    |also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.
    .

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