In the previous entry, I outlined a brief sketch of the Drake Equation. For more on that, check Wikipedia's article - it's a little more in depth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
I had described the conditions likely leading to intelligent life. But, this is a bit tricky. Cetaceans and Octopi are intelligent, perhaps even sentient, but because they live underwater, cannot develop any form of permanent records or technology.
The other problem is that human level intelligence is very expensive. Our brain demands some 20% of the body's energy resources, and a very long childhood to develop that brain. This price means humans are nowhere near the fastest species for our weight class, nor the strongest. Our teeth and nails are terrible weapons compared with a Cougar's, and they run three times as fast as we do. Our brain must be employed to make up for that.
And it does, extremely well. We throw things well. We are the Jackie Chan of species, utilizing anything in our environment for both attack and defense. This creativity is what led to civilization in the first place. Hunting in groups meant we had to learn to communicate more than just raw emotions. "You circle around back" was probably one of the first things we figured out how to communicate. Of course, it wouldn't have been in English, which has only been around for the past couple of millennia. The first proto-languages probably appeared 50,000 years ago or more, and those with extremely limited vocabularies.
At any rate, it took civilization to finally harness the true potential of high intelligence. Suddenly, language had much more to describe. Humans created and innovated new tools, new ideas, a feedback loop which has been tightening ever since.
Ultimately, this gave rise to the Industrial Revolution, and with it, machinery, and non-verbal communication at a distance: first telegraph, then radio.
So, it's pretty much a given, that any extraterrestrial intelligence would need to follow a similar path. But, though it might seem inevitable, we've had some fortune along the way to make it all possible.
No large meteoric impacts on our planet the past few million years.
No supernovae within 30-40 light years of our planet.
No sudden, catastrophic climate change.
No particularly voracious, nearly impossible to fight off predators.
No large scale outbreak of some lethal disease. (The Black Death of the 14th Century killed a lot, but it didn't kill everybody.)
Even so, Genetic Researchers have determined that sometime around 70,000 years ago, we came very close to extinction. Every human alive today is descendant from that one tribe that survived.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is fond of saying that the Universe is trying to kill us. Not quite, but it certainly does make survival very difficult.
So, an extraterrestrial intelligence has to survive against the same long odds.
Only to have to deal with their own violent nature.
Although writers love to suggest that Aliens would look on humanity with disdain at our violent nature, our propensity for destruction, chances are, they would've had to survive against the same issues. Why?
As I outlined before, predator species tend to be the more intelligent, as they have to outthink their prey. Also, meat eaters get much more energy from their food, and thus have more spare time. Predatory species are naturally more violent. Survival means beating the competition, and that means having a more aggressive nature. Can you even imagine a Champion Boxer telling the media, "Oh, I don't like to fight. We should just talk our differences over." We had to beat our way to the top through a lot of competition.
However, this leads to an interesting conundrum.
What happens when a violent, competitive species begins developing high technology? Any competition between groups (pretty much inevitable) leads to development of more powerful weapons, and eventually, weapons powerful enough to completely annihilate themselves. The Universe is quite possibly littered with the remnants of intelligent civilizations that bombed themselves into oblivion, or merely back into the Stone Age.
And it isn't even deliberate weapons that we could destroy ourselves with. The necessary step of an Industrial Era has led to dangerously high Carbon Dioxide levels in our atmosphere. We don't even know what the true ramifications of that are, and we're still putting the stuff out at record levels every year. Even without bombs, we might find our civilization wiped out by ever more violent storms, ever more violent oceans, and a runaway greenhouse effect that eventually kills off all life and boils away our oceans.
The desire to compete has hampered nations' willingness to drastically, quickly change over their energy production to more sustainable technologies.
We have spaceflight, but barely. As yet, we cannot move large numbers of people safely off planet to keep our species alive. And we won't, for quite some time. We're treading a fine line, here.
Now, perhaps Extraterrestrial Intelligences have been a little smarter, a little more willing to work together to protect their home planet while they're still dependent on it. If they were, and they eventually begin colonizing other systems, they're safe.
Except if their home galaxy's central black hole decides to swallow a few dozen stars in a single year, and blasts out enough gamma radiation to exterminate half the galaxy all at once.
Maybe Neil deGrasse Tyson is right after all.
No comments:
Post a Comment