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Comment by pavanred | Hacker News Reader

Isn't "intelligent life" just a function of time of "life"? I am reading the book "Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness" currently and the book makes the case that intelligence and/or consciousness has evolved separately in mammals (humans) and cephalopods.

The more I look at diversity and evolution of life on Earth, it seems like "intelligent life" as we know it is just a inevitable consequence of evolution, given enough time, perhaps.

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Well adapted life is a consequence of evolution. Intelligence is not necessary to survive. I am not sure who the master of the planet is: us or ants? Both are incredibly successful but with totally different strategies.

> Intelligence is not necessary to survive

It's even debatable whether it is an asset.

In fact, it can be argued that intelligence leads to low birth rates and population decline that extrapolates to eventual extinction.

Or it leads to avoiding overpopulation and depletion of resources. I think the intelligent thing for us to do would be to limit ourselves to a certain population size and stop growing.

It would be lovely, but this hypothesis is not confirmed by our observation.

Ssems we are not as intelligent as we think :-)

Either that, or intelligence is overrated.

Intelligence is overrated because non-intelligence lacked the faculties for contributing any offsetting negative ratings.

"Intelligent life" as we know it requires multi-cellular heterotrophic organisms. That depends on an abundance of resources (energy et al) able to give rise not merely to life but to a robust ecosystem. Without enough ecological niches there aren't enough ways for life to diversify significantly. Without enough energy and other resources you won't have either the generation cycle time or the carrying capacity to enable evolution of "advanced" multi-cellular life. There are environments on Earth that support life but could not support the development of intelligent life, they just lack the resources to do so. That might be true for some environments throughout the Universe as well. There might be places where some life can survive but is constrained from advancing beyond simple single cellular organisms due to lack of resources.

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