You know what I think?
An alien civilization containing Intelligent Life, far beyond our evolutionary progress, might not have invented a way to go to space.

You know why?
Because Ideas are not inevitable.

Give an AI something to do, they will do it as sufficiently as possible. Tell it to think for its own, and you cannot make the argument it would have thought and made the same progress we had.
The reason every person is unique, is because no one else will ever think the same way, see things the same way as them. AI's will not acheive what we would have in the future, without human help. You can debate Free Will all you want, but I know for sure freedom of thought exists. Maybe all my actions are planned, and we live in a multiverse, I dunno. I do know, that my thoughts are not planned. As long as that is true, inventions become abstract, and you can no longer say the ideas needed in order to make those inventions are inevitable. This is why, in my opinion, even if other intelligent life exists, and it succeeds our intelligence, you cannot say we are not the first to have invented or acheived something, and more importantly you cannot say that AI which is smarter than us will make more progress than us, the human factor is irrelevant, because even if we assume they are the same as us in all aspects but much much smarter, the simple fact remains, nothing will think the exact same as anyone in any given moment, for as long as the mind remains non-material.

It's not that AI, and other advanced Intelligent Life in the universe couldn't make more progress than us, it's that there is no definitive answer to that question, no matter what the intelligence gap is.

Also, it is more likely that the physical limitations of our universe will detract almost all from ever trying to reach each other.
That and the prime directive...They just need to look at the middle east and say: beam me up Scotty.

Well, "progress" is a highly subjective term.

If you mean space exploration, then I agree, being intelligent doesn't mean you have the desire to want to travel beyond your own planet. That's more to do with curiosity or necessity.

Isn't it simply a matter of probability, i.e. arbitrarily smart AIs are maybe not guaranteed, but surely increasingly likely to make many of those great (or equivalent other) discoveries. I mean, I can imagine an AI as big as a Planet with IQ 10^80, which is so out of luck that it keeps missing relativity theory all the time for some dumb reason (gets distracted by meteor flying by, or cat videos). But what are the odds

(November 10, 2015 at 4:22 am)robvalue Wrote: Well, "progress" is a highly subjective term.

If you mean space exploration, then I agree, being intelligent doesn't mean you have the desire to want to travel beyond your own planet. That's more to do with curiosity or necessity.

I think the desire to travel beyond one's own planet is probably primarily a socialogical, not a biological, artifact of intelligence. Whether a race sufficiently intelligent to be able to leave its planet actually does so would therefore be correlated to whether there is sociological advantages to having a culture that promotes exploration. I suspect there is.

So on a planet where there is intelligent life, random permutations of cultures and immediate local environments would undoubtedly produce a range of subcultures, some of which would be more inclined to explore than others. The ones that has a higher tendency towards exploration may also enjoy higher chance of prospering and gaining social and material advantage over the others. Eventually, one supposes that it would be such a subculture that would both be the first to attain space travel capability, and also to impose its exploratory outlook on the rest of the civilization.

(November 10, 2015 at 3:48 am)heatiosrs Wrote: You know what I think?
An alien civilization containing Intelligent Life, far beyond our evolutionary progress, might not have invented a way to go to space.

You know why?
Because Ideas are not inevitable.

Give an AI something to do, they will do it as sufficiently as possible. Tell it to think for its own, and you cannot make the argument it would have thought and made the same progress we had.
The reason every person is unique, is because no one else will ever think the same way, see things the same way as them. AI's will not acheive what we would have in the future, without human help. You can debate Free Will all you want, but I know for sure freedom of thought exists. Maybe all my actions are planned, and we live in a multiverse, I dunno. I do know, that my thoughts are not planned. As long as that is true, inventions become abstract, and you can no longer say the ideas needed in order to make those inventions are inevitable. This is why, in my opinion, even if other intelligent life exists, and it succeeds our intelligence, you cannot say we are not the first to have invented or acheived something, and more importantly you cannot say that AI which is smarter than us will make more progress than us, the human factor is irrelevant, because even if we assume they are the same as us in all aspects but much much smarter, the simple fact remains, nothing will think the exact same as anyone in any given moment, for as long as the mind remains non-material.

It's not that AI, and other advanced Intelligent Life in the universe couldn't make more progress than us, it's that there is no definitive answer to that question, no matter what the intelligence gap is.

You seem to think scientific progress is a matter of chance, Of inscrutable minds in ivory towers that inexplicably and randomly hit upon truths which do not bear traceable relationships with each other,  as if there is no overarching, fundamental, interrelated, coherent and observable and measurable reality which would act as a powerful guides feedback mechanism that would strongly channel the formulation of ideas along relatively predictable trajectories.

(November 10, 2015 at 3:57 am)ignoramus Wrote: Also, it is more likely that the physical limitations of our universe will detract almost all from ever trying to reach each other.
That and the prime directive...They just need to look at the middle east and say: beam me up Scotty.

If I remember right, we're getting further and further away from other galaxies in real terms. This would make any contact increasingly unlikely.

Anom: good point.

(November 10, 2015 at 5:17 am)robvalue Wrote:

(November 10, 2015 at 3:57 am)ignoramus Wrote: Also, it is more likely that the physical limitations of our universe will detract almost all from ever trying to reach each other.
That and the prime directive...They just need to look at the middle east and say: beam me up Scotty.

If I remember right, we're getting further and further away from other galaxies in real terms. This would make any contact increasingly unlikely.

Anom: good point.

The average rate at which nearby galaxies recedes from us is but a tiny fraction of speed of light, and accelerating only slowly and on cosmological time scale.  Even if it takes us a billion years to achieve the capability to travel at 99% the speed of light, we would still then be able to overtake and explore all the trillions of galaxies that are currently within several billion light years of us before they are carried from our observable horizon forever by the accelerating expansion of the universe.

We should not underestimate the power of cosmological timescale to compound seemingly small probabilities into virtual certainties. So I think on cosmological timescale, massive collisions of many different intelligent organisms must be commonplace.

Okay, interesting! Thanks My knowledge on these subjects is sketchy.

Chuck, but I would have thought the amount of planets will the correct conditions for abiogenesis, let alone a successful diverse evolution, let alone that intelligence is a given, would be relatively minor. Then we assume that no extinction events in all these millions of years of evolution. I don't know.