Hacker News Reader

Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

> The fact that relatively high intelligence has arisen from many architectures multiple times on this planet bodes well for the frequency of intelligent life on exoplanets.

Yes, but if you expect high intelligence to result in spaceships and space exploration, the actual probability falls close to zero. Among all the "intelligent" species on Earth, only humans have been able to build stuff to cross the limits of their own beings. So we may well find out some kind of intelligent animals on remote planets, but it's apparently unlikely we get to see human-like species who have become as advanced as we are. Maybe in that sense we indeed are an accident of Nature.

View on HN

You could argue that since even we haven't really built actual space ships yet, the probability is unknown. It's still early here on Earth. We're just the first civilization to rise up on this rock and we have barely begun.

> You could argue

You could also argue that we have built weapons of mass destruction faster than spaceships and that the probability of destroying ourselves and make us come back to the stone age in the 100 years is higher than the probability of building spaceships and venturing into space.

only humans have been able to build stuff to cross the limits of their own beings.

Actually, no. There are animals that build tools, we've seen chimpanzees that warn other mates of man-made traps and even teach them to disable these. What's more, we've seen animals that enslave other animals, we've seen animals caring for animals of different kind.

Right. Also crows have been seen to use tools. I found that more surprising than chimpanzees using tools.

Crows will use cars to crack open nuts! I suspect the initial discovery was likely accidental; somewhere a crow dropped a nut and a car ran over it.

Let me come back to my original sentence:

> only humans have been able to build stuff to cross the limits of their own beings.

Maybe you did not get what I was pointing at. I'm not just talking about mere tools, I'm talking about building stuff bigger than us or making it possible for us to live in otherwise unlikely environments. We have planes, rockets, satellites, submarines, boats. Crows don't go under water and chimpanzees don't fly over our heads. There's clearly a difference in the animal realm between what humans and other animals are able to achieve, and this, in the very same evolution time/space.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com