Odds of intelligent life occuring?

[ignoramus]

Now I'm not going to let exact facts get in the way of what I'm thinking, but you'll get my general supposition.

1) The early earth has a massive collision with another huge arse planet thing. -extremely rare (considering the emptiness of space)
2) Somehow the earth was able to keep our huge arse "moon" (bigger than pluto!) into earth's orbit (extremely rare) (did our molten iron core help with the gravity needed?)
3) The iron core helped create a strong magnetosphere protecting future life from solar anhillation! (just made that bit up but it sounds reasonable )
4) The big moon's gravity affected the earth's tides substantially.
5) All this just happens to occur in a goldilocks zone. The rareness is even moar extremelier!
6) Big brothers in space (Jupiter, etc) help with deflecting incoming space junk from hitting the earth.
7) Chemistry + energy (the sun) + tidal forces + billions of years = microbial life (biology)
8) In a billion years of life + evolution = many millions of diverse life forming. (most extinct)
9) Only one species becomes intelligent in a billion years of nature rolling the dice. Another freak chance accident of evolution?

On their own, these events are very rare. To have them occur all together is fucking rare!
(I use "fucking" as a scientific term to get my point across, "fucking rare" is 1 to the power of Godzilla for the mathematicians here)

This is why I believe intelligent life is so ridiculously rare, it's practically a novelty of the universe.
So rare that 99.999% of all other intelligent life (I'm not saying there is any, please don't put words in my mouth!), won't ever contact any other life.

So yes theists, we are special! (but not in the way you guys think we are)

We underwent miraculous odds to get here so what do we do? Elect Trump in the position of the most powerful man in the known universe!@



Don't really have a point to make ... Just putting it out there.

[Aroura]

I could be wrong, but there have been multiple intelligences already, from my understanding. Neanderthals, for instance, arose separately from homosapiens. The "hobbits" found in New Zealand also appear to have evolved separately, and they used tools, including fire. I believe there are a total of 4 or 5 separate instances of primates evolving to tool use, we are simply to only currently surviving example.

Also, define intelligent. Whales, dolphins and other cetaceans do not use tools in any advanced way, but they lack the physical abilities to really do so. They do however appear to have an emotional intelligence equal to or greater than that of humans, as well as fairly advanced actual language that they teach and pass on to their young.

I get your point, we are very unlikely, and should feel awe at our existence, but sometimes I wonder if we are really as unlikely as we think we are.

[ignoramus]

I get your point about intelligence. No arguments at all.

I'm wondering if there's a critical mass where you have to reach a certain level of intelligence where you can know how to communicate, and record your stories/experiences/discoveries for the exponential advancement of future generations to grow further on.

I look at the chimp videos and realise that every generation is reinventing the wheel from scratch...

I believe we are unique to reach that level of intelligence. Let's just call the dolphins and whales "gentle philosophers"!
Let's face it... All they can do is eat, shit, replicate and think. (Not much different from a human philosopher! )

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Neanderthals, homo sapiens, the "hobbits", all rose from a single line of hominids. We separated from the chimps 7 million years ago, and our branch produced many "near humans". We're the one that survived.

So far.

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Chances for intelligent life to happen? So far, 100%. In the universe at large we have no clue. Don't make the Error of Samples.

[Brian37]

It is a very extremely high probability that other life that has our level of thinking and cognition exists elsewhere knowing there is an estimated 200 billion galaxies known so far. Having said that, I still do not like any little green men Area 51 conspiracy bullshit.

I think even that life even if more advanced, might have better communication and further space travel distance, but would still be stuck with the same problems of QM physics and distance problems we do. I am no fan of blindly assuming because QM points to possibilities that everything will pan out just because it looks good on paper.

I do not see the "Transporter" of Star Trek ever being a possibility. I do not see the Warp Drive either. In fact, a few years ago si fi nutters jumped the gun on the NASA article calling it "plausible", failing to read the entire article which also called it impractical because of the energy and resources needed to make it happen. I think even as much as QM will garner new information and technology in the future, science is science and si fi is still si fi.

We should expect to find microbial life, at some point, even within our solar system. All the atoms in the universe stem from the same big bang so yes, in theory, knowing the number of galaxies thus the googles of planets it should not surprise anyone that life like us exists elsewhere. But, I would also highly suspect it would be stuck locally like we are even if it were to have a longer range of communication and travel.

I think what is more important for humans right now if we want to expand our ride, is to reduce pollution, climate change, war, poverty, and create a meteor defense system. It would do humans no good to look for other life if at the same time we are running to jump off our own cliff and destroy ourselves.

Even if in theory we could go to every single earth like planet in the universe, it would still constitute maybe 1%, and that would still be 10s of billions. I think our best bet, would be communication at some point, but that would require not only lots of work, but tons of luck.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I've seen figures of 2 trillion galaxies.

[Aroura]

Neanderthals, homo sapiens, the "hobbits", all rose from a single line of hominids. We separated from the chimps 7 million years ago, and our branch produced many "near humans". We're the one that survived.

So far.

---

Chances for intelligent life to happen? So far, 100%. In the universe at large we have no clue. Don't make the Error of Samples.

We all arose from a single line of life, too.

I mean, the chimps appeared to have separated before advanced tool use. Each of those species I mentioned developed their advancements at different times and drastically different locations from each other. If humans all died out, chances are another primate would fill that void eventually.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Neanderthals, homo sapiens, the "hobbits", all rose from a single line of hominids. We separated from the chimps 7 million years ago, and our branch produced many "near humans". We're the one that survived.

So far.

---

Chances for intelligent life to happen? So far, 100%. In the universe at large we have no clue. Don't make the Error of Samples.

We all arose from a single line of life, too.

I mean, the chimps appeared to have separated before advanced tool use. Each of those species I mentioned developed their advancements at different times and drastically different locations from each other. If humans all died out, chances are another primate would fill that void eventually.

I was referring to the hominids.

[I_am_not_mafia]

I think life and intelligence is abundant in the universe. We may not recognise it as such at all and we may never see it ourselves because we're trapped on a small ball of rock without any easy method to cross the vast distances of space.

When considering how complexity has developed throughout the history of the universe, first the development of matter, then chemistry and geology etc the development of both life and of intelligence is just more of the same. They both allow for thermodynamic gradients to be exploited increasing entropy globally.

I haven't got around to reading it yet because I've been too busy, but this paper is relevant:

Life as we know it - Karl Friston

Abstract

This paper presents a heuristic proof (and simulations of a primordial soup) suggesting that life—or biological self-organization—is an inevitable and emergent property of any (ergodic) random dynamical system that possesses a Markov blanket. This conclusion is based on the following arguments: if the coupling among an ensemble of dynamical systems is mediated by short-range forces, then the states of remote systems must be conditionally independent. These independencies induce a Markov blanket that separates internal and external states in a statistical sense. The existence of a Markov blanket means that internal states will appear to minimize a free energy functional of the states of their Markov blanket. Crucially, this is the same quantity that is optimized in Bayesian inference. Therefore, the internal states (and their blanket) will appear to engage in active Bayesian inference. In other words, they will appear to model—and act on—their world to preserve their functional and structural integrity, leading to homoeostasis and a simple form of autopoiesis.

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I've seen figures of 2 trillion galaxies.

400 billion stars in this galaxy alone.

[Aroura]

We all arose from a single line of life, too.

I mean, the chimps appeared to have separated before advanced tool use. Each of those species I mentioned developed their advancements at different times and drastically different locations from each other. If humans all died out, chances are another primate would fill that void eventually.

I was referring to the hominids.

They are the same genus, but all different species.

What I was referring to is that there are at least 4 non ancestral hominids. They are still hominids, but separate branches, not part of our direct chain of human evolution.

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I think life and intelligence is abundant in the universe. We may not recognise it as such at all and we may never see it ourselves because we're trapped on a small ball of rock without any easy method to cross the vast distances of space.

When considering how complexity has developed throughout the history of the universe, first the development of matter, then chemistry and geology etc the development of both life and of intelligence is just more of the same. They both allow for thermodynamic gradients to be exploited increasing entropy globally.

I haven't got around to reading it yet because I've been too busy, but this paper is relevant:

Life as we know it - Karl Friston

Abstract

This paper presents a heuristic proof (and simulations of a primordial soup) suggesting that life—or biological self-organization—is an inevitable and emergent property of any (ergodic) random dynamical system that possesses a Markov blanket. This conclusion is based on the following arguments: if the coupling among an ensemble of dynamical systems is mediated by short-range forces, then the states of remote systems must be conditionally independent. These independencies induce a Markov blanket that separates internal and external states in a statistical sense. The existence of a Markov blanket means that internal states will appear to minimize a free energy functional of the states of their Markov blanket. Crucially, this is the same quantity that is optimized in Bayesian inference. Therefore, the internal states (and their blanket) will appear to engage in active Bayesian inference. In other words, they will appear to model—and act on—their world to preserve their functional and structural integrity, leading to homoeostasis and a simple form of autopoiesis.

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I've seen figures of 2 trillion galaxies.

400 billion stars in this galaxy alone.

That's interesting Mathilda, I'll have to read that. I have long been off the opinion that life is simply another state of matter. One that is inevitable when conditions are met.