First we need to decide how intelligent are the dolphins, then let us look at the stars.
Every single life form on Earth today had exactly the same time to do its evolution in. Us, bats, dolphins, tapeworms, birch trees, amoeba, mushrooms, all of that had exactly the same chance(s) in the same time span.
And we don't even know if and how mushrooms and trees communicate, let alone if they "think", for our near-sighted definition of thoughts. We don't even know what to make of birds, e.g. crows, with respect to the size of their brains and what they can do.
Is our planet, taken as a whole, alive, in some form of the Gaia hypothesis? The correct answers as of this time are either "we don't know" or "it depends on the definition of alive."
That Star Trek trope of "everything in the Universe is just like us with different faces" really needs to be put to rest.
Even H.R. Giger was boring and unimaginative with regards to how he envisioned the Alien. That's clearly a creature influenced by Earth-ism - a quadruped, with a single head and mouth and a flexible spine and claws, it's basically a weird cat.
> That Star Trek trope of "everything in the Universe is just like us with different faces" really needs to be put to rest.
Budget constraints aside, Star Trek aliens were used as a prop to explore extremes of terrestrial human behaviour and culture from an outside perspective - take a human and remove emotions and have them governed purely by logic, you get a Vulcan. Take a human and exaggerate their tendencies towards violence and honour, you have a Klingon, and so on.
Even in the original series there were truly alien aliens - for example the Squire of Gothos was a being of pure energy who just assumed human form, Devil in the Dark had a silicon-based creature, and the Tholians were an intelligent crystalline species who could only exist in high temperatures.
In Star Trek TNG there was a story arc that culminated in the reveal of a precursor humanoid race that had seeded their genome around the galaxy so that they ultimately resulted in the “big” races like humans, Klingons, Vulcans, Cardassians and so on.
Even if you discount the semi-canonical explanation that the Alien was a mixture of human & "entirely fabricated" DNA, Giger's Alien was shaped the way it was for literally- and metaphorically-painful sexual artistic reasons, not as a serious hypothesis for alien life.
> First we need to decide how intelligent are the dolphins, then let us look at the stars.
The premise is wrong. The premise here is that intelligence is the only factor. Physics doesn't allow dolphins to enter the bronze age. Hell, even if dolphins grew arms and hands they couldn't enter the bronze age. They're probably smart enough to do so, but there are other factors limiting them.
We have looked at Earth. We can look to the stars at the same time. It isn't an "or" operation.
Yeah but we're not really talking about bronze ages or if a species can achieve comparable technology, but whether we can correctly detect intelligence, or even life, around us.
I don't think we should label dolphins as un-intelligent just because their physical environment doesn't allow them to smelt metal.
My point is - I'd like to avoid judging something as (not) alive or intelligent just because it is (or isn't) similar to our daily life.
> My point is - I'd like to avoid judging something as (not) alive or intelligent just because it is (or isn't) similar to our daily life.
I think this is fair, but I also think when people say "detect intelligent alien life" it is shorthand for "intelligent and technologically capable life that would also be able to develop things like radio and interstellar travel." The latter is pretty cumbersome. I don't think dolphins are unintelligent, I don't think an ant is either. But in this context that's not what we're talking about. Language has limits and we use shortcuts like this all the time. Let's just be clear what page we're on and let's try not to inject another page just because the same word is used to mean multiple things.
> Even H.R. Giger was boring and unimaginative with regards to how he envisioned the Alien. That's clearly a creature influenced by Earth-ism - a quadruped, with a single head and mouth and a flexible spine and claws, it's basically a weird cat.
When the franchise came into being, you're probably right. But in all fairness, the back story and the biological concepts in the Alien universe has been refined since then. For example, the human-like qualities of the xenomorph creature is now explained by the biological merger of an alien substance with the host. When a human was infected, the substance developed into a parasite that took-on characteristics of the host.
Fundamentally, the black goo (i.e. the substance) we saw in Prometheus was pretty much the source of all the alien creatures. It was basically an instrument that deconstructed existing life forms and rebuilt weaponised variants of them.
> Every single life form on Earth today had exactly the same time to do its evolution in. Us, bats, dolphins, tapeworms, birch trees, amoeba, mushrooms, all of that had exactly the same chance(s) in the same time span.
This is patently false as these species have very different places within the phylogenetic tree. Emphasis on tree, since their adaptivity experiments did not have a linear timeline either; we didn’t evolve to have speech from scratch, we’ve adopted existing partial solutions, e.g. having a tongue, to develop it.
And we don’t need to delve into phenomenology of being a mushroom, adaptivity gives us an observable proxy to the “intelligence” of an organism; how general and efficient of a problem solver they are, the ultimate problem being surviving genes onward. Turns out humans do exceptionally well, for the problems they’ve encountered so far. We’ll see if/how we can solve anthropogenic coordination problems of our day.
> That Star Trek trope of "everything in the Universe is just like us with different faces" really needs to be put to rest.
You need to cook a "complex adaptive organism" solution with the same periodic table and a handful of forces. It's like coding a CRUD application with slightly different sub-requirements and the exact same programming language. How different can they be?
If you need more creativity you have to break apart from physical requirements and the right genre for that is fantasy.
"And we don’t need to delve into phenomenology of being a mushroom, adaptivity gives us an observable proxy to the “intelligence” of an organism; how general and efficient of a problem solver they are, the ultimate problem being surviving genes onward."
By that logic the most intelligent animals is a cockroach
Viruses and prions reproduce, not only are they not intelligent, they are not even alive.
> By that logic the most intelligent animals is a cockroach
Firstly, please notice the quotes around intelligence; clearly we’re playing with a fast and loose definition.
Secondly, if humans had driven themselves into extinction with nuclear warfare, that would as well have been true.
Intelligence is not mere symbolic processing, nor symbolic processing is guaranteed to be adaptive, as evidenced with its failure modes in our perennial irrationalities.
> Viruses and prions reproduce, not only are they not intelligent, they are not even alive.
I know one particular virus twisting humanity’s arm these days, and in a way that is not fully intelligible to us yet. I wouldn’t readily diminish the internal logic that’s going on there.
Indeed. If there were civilizations that communicate on geological time scales, how would we even know they are alive? If whales and dogs and bats are too alien to communicate with, what hope do we have with aliens?
Completely agree - the vast differences in the Earth's species and their intelligence should be an indication of the enormous range of possibilities we should expect...Saying that, since "most intelligent" species on Earth are bipedal, it means it's most likely intelligent aliens would be too, does not only seem ignorant to the sheer number of factors and possibilities, but also to other species on Earth and ways intelligence can be manifested.
Every single life form on Earth today had exactly the same time to do its evolution in. Us, bats, dolphins, tapeworms, birch trees, amoeba, mushrooms, all of that had exactly the same chance(s) in the same time span.
And we don't even know if and how mushrooms and trees communicate, let alone if they "think", for our near-sighted definition of thoughts. We don't even know what to make of birds, e.g. crows, with respect to the size of their brains and what they can do.
Is our planet, taken as a whole, alive, in some form of the Gaia hypothesis? The correct answers as of this time are either "we don't know" or "it depends on the definition of alive."
That Star Trek trope of "everything in the Universe is just like us with different faces" really needs to be put to rest.
Even H.R. Giger was boring and unimaginative with regards to how he envisioned the Alien. That's clearly a creature influenced by Earth-ism - a quadruped, with a single head and mouth and a flexible spine and claws, it's basically a weird cat.