Comment by beej71 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beej71 | Hacker News Reader

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One thing that always struck me about humanlike intelligence on Earth is how quickly it came about.

The dinosaurs had 180 million years or so to get it right, and we find no evidence of so much as a simple tool. Were they no smarter that crows? All that time?

And Homo has been around, what, 2 million years? In just 2 million years we've gone from basically zero tech to outer-freakin-space.

Arguably, we've gone from nothing to outer-freakin-space in the last 6000 years, starting around the Bronze Age. That's astoundingly quick given how long life has existed on Earth.

So it seems like as the dice were being thrown around we were just waiting for that magic run of all sixes that enabled us to, in the blink of an eye, become spacefaring.

What was it? (Opposable thumbs? Language? War? Big brains? Etc?) And how likely are these things to happen in a magical combination? It took its sweet time here. Did we get lucky it only took 4 billion years? Or unlucky it took that long at all?

But it never happened to the hapless dinos. Which is too bad, because space dinosaurs would be _awesome_.

[Meme of dinosaurs looking up at the asteroid falling from the sky and one saying, "Oh fuck! The economy!"]

> What was it?

My lacking-evidence and very unverified theory is that it's something like bicameral mind theory. It wasn't until we developed a complex enough brain to have self metacognition that we started to take off as a species.

My lacking-evidence theory is that this primarily evolved in mammals due to the requirements of child care imposed by mammalian birth.

Is it possible that this presupposes the utility of inteligence for survival? It's an easy thing to assume, but a decent argument could be made for intelligence in sufficient quantity actually running counter to the fitness of a species.

I would assume our style of intelligence isn't any kind of "goal", it just happened.

How do you contend with the fact that humans dominate every ecosystem we enter? We don't just become the apex predator, we annihilate them all, entirely. Additionally, we find incredibly complex use cases for resources they ignored which increase wealth and prosperity across our civilization. To me, that suggests human intelligence is the most powerful force of survival in the known universe.

Annihilating the eco system we life in demonstrates that our intelligence isn't that good, and doesn't seem to showcase it's a powerful force for long-term survival.

Of course there are plenty of metrics by which other species exceed humans, even some cognitive ones, and human intelligence in the end might just mean quick world domination followed by a quicker extinction, but the power and planetary supremacy that it endowed humans with in a cosmic blink of an eye is undeniable. No other species even comes close.

Ecosystem-destroying catastrophic behavior isn't unique to humans, either. We are the only known form of life that can bring it about on a global scale, reason about it, and have the potential to consciously avert it.

Destroying and consuming everything on earth for short term comfort and gains isn't what I'd call the smartest move.

It's like burning your bed in winter because you're cold, it sure feels food for a few minutes but then you start breathing in the fumes and wondering where you'll sleep tomorrow

The trick for the species is to get off planet to the infinite resources in the wider galaxy, in which case it isn't short term gains. It might suck for individuals and the ecosystems destroyed.

We can't even live sustainably on the planet we evolved to thrive on for millions of years and people think we'll just terraform a whole or planet/solar system/galaxy...

Living sustainably has little to do with expansion of the species (and population, pretty much by definition). Almost the opposite. Maybe the solution to Fermi's Paradox being discussed is other species do become fully sustainable and thus never spread. Leaving us with the opportunity to devour the galaxy like a cancer.

Maybe intelligent dinosaurs had a very strong "no littering" policy.

Silurian hypothesis is very intriguing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis

I've always wondered about this. Let's say civilization evolved a billion years ago on Mars or Venus to the level we are now. Would we ever be able to detect it? If they put up satellites, could some still be orbiting, or would they all have degraded by now? What if they really wanted to leave some sign they were there? What could they do? Venus would be really hard unless satellites work. But maybe Mars?

I imagine there would be residue of artificially created nuclear materials that would still be detectable a billion years later. Some half lives are measured in sextillion/quintillion years.

I don’t have a reference handy but I remember reading there is a candidate period around 55 million years ago. The temperature rose rapidly and there are elevated heavy metals and isotopes in the crust from that time period.

Remember that the crows are dinosaurs in a sense. The dinosaurs are still in the game; don't count them out yet.

Exponential growth [1]

We went from the invention of radio in 1895 to a moon landing within 74 years. And 53 years later we have tech that is vastly superior to what we had in 1969.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth

Plenty of less-intelligent animals have been around since long before humans, and they will probably be around long after humans.

Ultimately all less intelligent animals on this planet will perish due to heat death of the sun unless we bring them with us to other planets.

Ultimately all life will disappear due to the heat death of the universe so why bother.

Humanity is fairly new, I doubt we'll make it to the heat death of the sun. Modern humans are 300 000 years old (anatomically, 50 000 behaviourally), the sun will run for another 5 000 000 000. We're running out of easy to use resources after not even 150 years of industrial progress, people are getting less and less healthy, fertility is going down thanks to pollution, many eco systems are on the verge of collapse with unpredictable consequences for us, &c.

I think we have many things to focus on before saving animals from the heat death of the sun

> We're running out of easy to use resources after not even 150 years of industrial progress,

All of human civilization (and some pre-civilization time) has been industrial progress, and even if you are counting from the beginning of the popularly-named Industrial Revolution, that's fairly arbitrary but also 260+ years, not 150.

The OP seemed to be saying that less intelligent animals have it made. It’s just us intelligent yet foolish humans who mess everything up.

My point was that ultimately, only intelligence will save us all. The dinosaurs tried the ignorance is bliss strategy.

You are assuming it is actually possible for human life to move to other solar systems.

It's much more likely that we could send bacteria or extremophiles to another planet and have them become self sustaining there than it is for a colony of humans, given everything we know today about the limits of space travel (time scale VS resource requirements).

my uneducated take is maybe other civilizations existed on earth or other planets but then self-destructed or got destroyed by a asteroid just like the dinos. if human life on earth is a nano second in a day of the planet's life. surely these things can come and go without leaving any traces. poof just varnish into thin air.

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