Drake Equation

[fsci123]

Sure on that? What about caves or fur? Maybe nature did not yet build a space suit, but will you bet on it being not possible?

Intelligence alone is no self-purpose. Thinking you are no longer hungry doesn't stop you from starving. That tools can replace teeth is sure an advantage, but it is not a special advantage. A predator brain can use its intelligence also simply for tactics. Also a brain is no sacrifice. You did never intentionally pay a price for it. You got one for free, maybe even for a purpose, that nobody really understands, but still, you have a instantly lost all the rest. Your brain just got bigger the more use you found for it, while the rest of your body was optimized for having a brain that made life easier.

Think Think Think Think Think...:facepalm:



72hours to GL581 addon completion

 

[Urwumpe]

Urwumpe, your knowledge is almost always beyond my own, but unfortunately I have to say that here You Failed Biology Forever.

Human ancestors were never close to those of dinosaurs probably since the first amniotes, a better example might be a Cynodont, a group of advanced therapsids (which are themselves group of synapsids, which includes mammals and their mammal-like (extinct) relatives):

Don't let your pelycosaur ancestors hear that.

 

[RisingFury]

Nature couldnt build a shelter or make clothes or make tools. Nature creates intelligence with the sacrifice of biological advantageous because intelligence can build and provide for itself. I dont think there would be any tents laying around if humans werent here.

"Nature" didn't create intelligence with intent. There's no "forest brain network" like on Pandora that decided: "Oh, I'm gonna build intelligent life today, because then my work will be easier!"

 

[fsci123]

"Nature" didn't create intelligence with intent. There's no "forest brain network" like on Pandora that decided: "Oh, I'm gonna build intelligent life today, because then my work will be easier!"

Number 1 i hate the avatar movie
Number 2 intelligence just occurs jut like dust on an old book. Humans like to make things into people like entities.

 

[Urwumpe]

Number 2 intelligence just occurs jut like dust on an old book. Humans like to make things into people like entities.

Wrong. Behaviour just occurs, but not every behavior is intelligent. There is already a very intelligent philosophical debate ongoing, what intelligence actually is. Which is sure a sign of intelligence.

But where does it start, where does it end? If you know the consequences of your actions, does that make you intelligent? Or do you also need to plan actions? Are you only intelligent if you have a word for your own thoughts?

What I can so far only agree on from an artificial intelligence article: There is no intelligence without a body. A body is what gives your thoughts shape.

 

[T.Neo]

Maybe nature did not yet build a space suit, but will you bet on it being not possible?

I would bet on it being extremely unlikely... there are many facets to the space environment to which raw biology doesn't take well to.

Don't let your pelycosaur ancestors hear that.

A pelycosaur is as much of a dinosaur as a baboon is.

Ok, so it looks reptillian, it's kinda scaly, scary looking, but that doesn't mean "dinosaur"... even organisms that can be described that way that are far more closely related to dinosaurs aren't "dinosaurs" themselves.

If you look closely at a Dimetrodon, you will see the differences from diapsid reptiles, and the kinship with other synapsids... for example, the morphology of the dentition.

Number 1 i hate the avatar movie

I don't think that was RisingFury's point. His point is that the ecosystem never decided to hold a conference to somehow create intelligent life.

I know a "strong Gaia" hypothesis where the planetary ecosystem is sentient or sapient is rather silly, but I do wonder if the global ecosystem could have some sort of intelligence, individual organisms can have certain actions and they all interact, so it is a sort of super-system...

It's quite funny that most of the computing power in this "super-system" is in humans, which is probably blasphemy for environmentalists the world over.

Just because there is a global super-system of interacting organisms doesn't mean it's sapient, or even that you could do simple arithmetic on it.

Number 2 intelligence just occurs jut like dust on an old book. Humans like to make things into people like entities.

Wrong. Intelligence occurs just like that dust getting stirred around in a primordial soup for hundreds of millions of years, forming together into nifty growing, self-replicating organisms, which then evolve into clumps of growing, self-replicating organisms, which then evolve into organised clumps of organisms, which then evolve into sapient organisms...

It may be driven by random mutations and so on and so forth, but the actual processes involved are a good deal more complex than stuff on the scale of dust falling onto a book... that is already so simple that it happens in most of the universe.

 

[Urwumpe]

A pelycosaur is as much of a dinosaur as a baboon is.

Common ancestor. Also the early synapsids lacked temperature regulation, just like reptiles today.

You are right, these are, if you are precise, not dinosaurs. I'll correct the less precise statement to "Pelycosaur ancestors" in the future, and hope this is still giving enough clues that parts of our brain are really badly old architecture. But I think rhetorically, the evil brain hacking with "dinosaur ancestors" is better as it gives even somebody, who does not hide Darwins Origin of the Species in his Playboy magazines, a fair chance to get a feeling about what I mean.

If you think that fear is human, you are wrong, it is a much older feeling, and the way how your body reacts to it in the first instant has likely never changed since the Permian.

 

[T.Neo]

Common ancestor. Also the early synapsids lacked temperature regulation, just like reptiles today.

Yes, but that did not make them common ancestors of dinosaurs and humans. Synapsids and diapsids seperated even earlier than the existence of pelycosaurs such as dimetrodon, in the carboniferous period.

You can either call dinosaurs dinosaurs, or call every organism in existence a dinosaur... for example, it would be more "accurate" to regard a snake or a monitor lizard as a dinosaur, while they are clearly not.

Has fear changed since the Permian? I don't think it's changed since at least the carboniferous and mostly since the devonian to be honest, or even earlier, but that depends on how much fear changes between tetrapods and other vertebrates.

Fear is pretty useful though, and if it's useful, there's nothing that makes it bad or inferior, even if it has evolutionary roots hundreds of millions of years back.

 

[Urwumpe]

Yes, but that did not make them common ancestors of dinosaurs and humans. Synapsids and diapsids seperated even earlier than the existence of pelycosaurs such as dimetrodon, in the carboniferous period.

True, but the separation of the reptiles and the mammals happened in the early Permian period - Diapsis have still Synapsids as ancestors.

Fear is pretty useful though, and if it's useful, there's nothing that makes it bad or inferior, even if it has evolutionary roots hundreds of millions of years back.

Wouldn't want to imply this.

But what makes up most of our so called intelligent behavior, is actually controlled by the neuronal equivalent of relay logic, primitive structures in our brain, that do all the dirty work, perform the heavy duty switching of different more specialized structures and did anatomically not change much since our ancestors left the amphibian/fish family.

When an artist writes the greatest love song of all times, the human parts of the brain only do the fine details, while the big concept is worked out by the same parts of the brain that already explained Synapsids that it is time to impress their females.

Which is why I wouldn't recommend being too fixated on intelligence alone, since intelligence is hardly defined and easily faked. Especially in the expectations we have on others. When people call for other people to act intelligent, they usually expect exactly the opposite from them. They just want them to follow their orders without diversion - like for example answering a friendly "Hello, ETs" with a friendly "Hello humans", instead of a "We don't buy any of yours."

 

[T.Neo]

True, but the separation of the reptiles and the mammals happened in the early Permian period - Diapsis have still Synapsids as ancestors.

Actually both diapsids and synapsids are present in carboniferous strata, Archaeothyris- a synapsid dated to 306 MYA, and Petrolacosaurus, dated to 302 million years ago.

I haven't heard of diapsids being descended directly from synapsids before, perhaps I am not in touch with the latest theories. Neverthless, I have a strong feeling that our usual notion of fear dates back to long before the first synapsids, I doubt that it is all that different in amphibians for example.

When an artist writes the greatest love song of all times, the human parts of the brain only do the fine details, while the big concept is worked out by the same parts of the brain that already explained Synapsids that it is time to impress their females.

So... when I'm scouring the internet for data on space colonies, my brain is lighting up in a similar way to that of a Hylonomus searching for food?

 

[Urwumpe]

So... when I'm scouring the internet for data on space colonies, my brain is lighting up in a similar way to that of a Hylonomus searching for food?

Depends on how space addicted you are. :lol:

 

[martins]

I wouldn't call abiogenesis improbable; not only does it appear that life formed relatively early in the Earth's history (indicating that it forms readily in suitable environments), but it has been theorised (and in limited cases, observed) that not only are prebiotic compounds common, but the conditions required for abiogenesis might also be quite common.

I'm not sure this argument is statistically sound. Not only is it dangerous to infer estimates of probability from a single sample, the problem in this case is the fact that in order for us to be around to ask the questions, life had to evolve in our system. Therefore all statistical inferences we can draw from our own example are conditional probabilities given that life evolved in our system. So the question is: "Given that life evolved in our solar system, can we draw any conclusions from the fact that it evolved early about general probability of life anywhere?" In my opinion, the answer is no.

Now if it could be proved that life evolved independently multiple times on Earth, that would be a different story in terms of the statistical significance. Unfortunately that either didn't happen, or its traces have long disappeared.

 

[T.Neo]

Of course life developed on Earth thus we exist, but life also developed relatively early... if it is "difficult" for life to get started, or the environments for it aren't all that common, then abiogenesis could have occured a billion, two billion, four billion years later, or even not at all. Instead, it occured early... either we can take that as some sort of coincidence, or we can take it that abiogenesis is "easy" enough that it pretty much happens as soon as the environments for it to happen exist, and that the environments in which it can occur might not be that rare.

The Miller-Urey experiment is a good example of how easy it can actually be to generate prebiotic compounds, such as amino acids... the conditions simulated in the original experiment might have been an incorrect representation of the early Earth, but the concept remains more-or-less valid.

There's a difference between saying "I am here, so obviously I exist" and "I am here, and I have bilateral symmetry, but that doesn't matter because I exist".

If evidence is found of abiogenesis occuring multiple times on Earth, it would be almost as good for the probability of the existence of life as the discovery of extraterrestrial life. If we assume that abiogenesis is "easy", it actually makes it quite probable that abiogenesis occured multiple times on the early Earth, but the results either went extinct or later merged together to form the domains of life we know now.

 

[martins]

Of course life developed on Earth thus we exist, but life also developed relatively early... if it is "difficult" for life to get started, or the environments for it aren't all that common, then abiogenesis could have occured a billion, two billion, four billion years later, or even not at all. Instead, it occured early... either we can take that as some sort of coincidence, or we can take it that abiogenesis is "easy" enough that it pretty much happens as soon as the environments for it to happen exist, and that the environments in which it can occur might not be that rare.

This is exactly my point. Life could have occurred earlier or later than it did, but it could not have happened not at all in this system, because then we wouldn't be here to wonder why it did. However, it could have happened not at all on every other potentially life-holding planet.

Imagine for a moment that life is so rare that it only happened once in our galaxy. If you string the lifetimes of all potentially life-supporting planets sequentially end to end, then somewhere along this sequence at some random location there is a life-evolving event. When the sequence is split up again into individual planet lifetimes, all but one sequence are empty, and the position of the life-emerging event relative to the lifespan of the relevant planet is entirely arbitrary (assuming that the conditions for life remain similar during the lifetime of the planet.) Therefore it is my contention that an early development of life in our system can never be taken for more than "some sort of coincidence".

Regarding your earlier statement about the probability of sapient life evolving from primitive life: I agree. I should have said "highly adapted" rather than "intelligent". Intelligence (whatever that may be) or sapience is a coincidental side effect of the evolution process, and although it has proven spectaculary successful in the short term, it may still turn out to be a dead end in the long run. And galaxy-wide, we may turn out to be a bit of a freak-show with our bulging brain cavities.

 

[T.Neo]

This is exactly my point. Life could have occurred earlier or later than it did, but it could not have happened not at all in this system, because then we wouldn't be here to wonder why it did. However, it could have happened not at all on every other potentially life-holding planet.

But we're not talking about whether life arose on Earth (which it obviously did), but rather how it arose and why.

Imagine for a moment that life is so rare that it only happened once in our galaxy. If you string the lifetimes of all potentially life-supporting planets sequentially end to end, then somewhere along this sequence at some random location there is a life-evolving event. When the sequence is split up again into individual planet lifetimes, all but one sequence are empty, and the position of the life-emerging event relative to the lifespan of the relevant planet is entirely arbitrary (assuming that the conditions for life remain similar during the lifetime of the planet.) Therefore it is my contention that an early development of life in our system can never be taken for more than "some sort of coincidence".

Your probability argument makes sense, but again one needs to postulate a universe where life is somehow extremely unlikely.

Rather, I'm saying that if the conditions on the early Earth were conducive to our current hypotheses of the formation of life, and if observation/experimental evidence shows that the formation of prebiotic compounds, for example, can "easily" happen in the environment, then the formation of life on the early Earth must have been likely, and thus, must have happened relatively early once the conditions existed.

If abiogenesis is likely, why shouldn't it happen relatively early? If abiogenesis happened relatively early, maybe that's because it is likely.

Of course there is no way to prove that without evidence from elsewhere, but that's similar to the fact that we have no evidence of extraterrestrial life, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but that we just haven't observed it yet.

My un-scientific mind is struggling to see how this is worse than "life is unlikely, therefore the time at which abiogenesis occurs in a planet's lifetime is random, therefore life is unlikely".

Regarding your earlier statement about the probability of sapient life evolving from primitive life: I agree. I should have said "highly adapted" rather than "intelligent". Intelligence (whatever that may be) or sapience is a coincidental side effect of the evolution process, and although it has proven spectaculary successful in the short term, it may still turn out to be a dead end in the long run. And galaxy-wide, we may turn out to be a bit of a freak-show with our bulging brain cavities.

Sapience isn't a "side effect" of the evolutionary process any more than a flipper or an eye is. It's an evolutionary trait- a better example of an evolutionary "side effect" might be the presence of an appendix in humans, or a remnant pelvic bone in modern whales.

How much of a dead-end sapience is partially depends on how much your self-loathing for humans is. A sapient species has the potential to far outlast any other species, but short-term success does not necessarily correlate into long-term success.

Our bulging brain cavities are not that abnormal on Earth at least... it seems pretty common for organisms to evolve more intelligence as time goes on, but sapience itself is a different story.