Intelligent LIfe

[GaijinPunch]

the distances involved are astronomical

Badump tssshhh!

[Square King]

I came in here to mutter stuff about organic life, intergalaxial travel and time, but I'm well covered.

[GaijinPunch]

I came in here to mutter stuff about organic life, intergalaxial travel and time, but I'm well covered.

See... even I can start cool-tempered, civilized debate. I just choose not to most of the time.

[Square King]

See... even I can start cool-tempered, civilized debate. I just choose not to most of the time.

FUCK YOUUUU

PS I love David Cross, so I enjoy all of your posts.

[Randorama]

You only have to read a few posts here think that.

Sorry, I don't understand this sentence, what do you mean?

- meet (and join): I don't see why there should be 0% chances that another intelligent life form wants to meet us. Even if the actual chance could be, say, 0,0001% of the universe-traveling species wants to catch up, then if it turns out that there's 1 million of such species, one may show up at some point. Making some "probabilistic thinking" without correct data can lead to some ridicuously wrong predictions, though.

- Thinking outside the box: intelligence is hardly a "whole" but rather a set of properties. Everyone in psychology has a theory of which properties make up intelligence. Personally I was wondering if we could get something that passes as intelligence and lacks some of these properties. If so, would we able to spot it in aliens? In other words, if ET comes here and does not like Oprah, would we consider it a smart fella? (Hyperbolic comment, I know...)

- What about stupid life? I am really ignorant on this, do we know if e.g. bacteria exist outside Earth? I remember some news regarding this possibility for Mars. I'd say that it would be interesting news, too.

[CMoon]

Wow, check out the poll. The numbers of posters here at the SHMUP forum that believe there are aliens among us (UFOs, little green men, etc.) is sneaking up higher. I wonder if you took a really big survey of a cross section of America what it would be?

I wonder how this figure would compare to the number that believe in ghosts, voodoo, etc.?

Randorama> I agree with you on the point about bacteria. I think it would be equally interesting to find ANY kind of life with origins outside of earth. Given that it would likely be very different from us in a biological sense (how is its heredity recorded? how does it metabolize? etc.), I'm sure it would open up huge doors for the sciences.

[GaijinPunch]

You only have to read a few posts here think that.

Sorry, I don't understand this sentence, what do you mean?

[/quote

It's a joke, meaning if you read a few posts at shmups, you would believe intelligence doesn't exist. Clearly this is impossible since people such as myself post such quality antics here.

Making some "probabilistic thinking" without correct data can lead to some ridicuously wrong predictions, though.

Yeah... but that's really all we can do at this point.

- What about stupid life? I am really ignorant on this, do we know if e.g. bacteria exist outside Earth? I remember some news regarding this possibility for Mars. I'd say that it would be interesting news, too.

Nothing has been found outside of our rock. Best candidates are remnants of bacteria (and maybe something living way below the surface) on Mars, as it apparently had water quite some time ago, and of course, Io with it's really weird cycle of water breaking through the cracks and coming up to the surface regularly.

[linko9]

I only glossed over the thread, so I apologize if this has already been brought up, but beyond the spatial dimension involved in this question, there's also a temporal dimension. Even if intelligent life outside of Earth did exist at some point in the history of the universe, it's very unlikely that it's coexisting with us temporally. Keep in mind that, in the grand scheme of things, planets/stars don't last all that long, and unless a civilization found out how to inhabit another planet, they would of course die when their planet became uninhabitable. Of course, there are plenty of other ways for a species to go extinct.

So then, it's highly unlikely that any one given intelligent alien species (assuming any ever existed/exist/will exist) would live concurrently with humanity. That means that the odds for intelligent life being "out there" as of right now are really much smaller than many people realize. After all, humans have only been around for 250,000 years (according to wikipedia...), and it's not inconceivable that we won't be around for another 250,000. So let's be generous, and say that our illustrious race will be around for half a million years. If our own species is representative of other potential intelligent species (and I guess there's no reason to assume that we are, but we've got no better evidence, so why not speculate?), and we take half a million years as the average life span of an intelligent species, and assume that life can start forming as soon as a bunch of galaxies were formed (no later than 1 billion years after the big bang, according to some random shit I found on wikipedia), that means we've got at least 10 billion years (leaving about 2 billion years for intelligent life to form from the first life) in which intelligent life could exist. Now I forget everything I learned about statistics, so this is going to sound really awkward, but assuming the half-million year life span in somehow accurate, that means about 20,000 intelligent species would have to have existed for there to be a good chance of one of those species living concurrently with us. And that's completely ignoring the future of the universe.

Obviously this is all a bunch of speculation, and the half-million year figure is likely horribly inaccurate, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that even if 100 alien civilizations have already arisen in the history of the universe, I wouldn't be surprised if none of them live concurrently with us.

[CMoon]

linko9> Yeah, I was thinking about this. That idea was put forward in Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama series and it sticks pretty clearly in my mind. If the universe is some 13-15 billion years old, it isn't just about being at the right place, but also the right time. The odds are astronomical.

I think most people who think there are aliens among us ALSO believe that they have the ability to travel through time and use wormholes or something to instantly travel through space. Basically think of the Tardis in Doctor Who.

As always, I love science fiction, I just don't think it's real.

[GaijinPunch]

I only glossed over the thread, so I apologize if this has already been brought up, but beyond the spatial dimension involved in this question, there's also a temporal dimension. Even if intelligent life outside of Earth did exist at some point in the history of the universe, it's very unlikely that it's coexisting with us temporally. Keep in mind that, in the grand scheme of things, planets/stars don't last all that long, and unless a civilization found out how to inhabit another planet, they would of course die when their planet became uninhabitable. Of course, there are plenty of other ways for a species to go extinct.

It was talked about a bit, but not necessarily so cut and dry. The question of "maybe we're first" was brought up, which is similar. While I agree there's a huge issue of the times the civilizations are alive (and even space faring) is likely to not overlap, stars actually do last quite a while. It's generally accepted that the age of the sun and the Earth is about 4.5 billion years, while the Universe in general under 15 billion. We've been around for about 1/3 of the entire show. I would hardly call this 'short'. We have only observed a few hundred planets of the last 15 years so it's hard to say how long other planets last (other than being destroyed by their stars). We know that smaller stars last much longer than larger, hotter ones... which in fact don't last very long in galactic terms. We would assume that life would be impossible around these stars if our timeline is somewhat standard.

and assume that life can start forming as soon as a bunch of galaxies were formed (no later than 1 billion years after the big bang, according to some random shit I found on wikipedia) that means we've got at least 10 billion years (leaving about 2 billion years for intelligent life to form from the first life) in which intelligent life could exist.

We've dated algae back to 3.2 billion years. Now, obviously intelligent life didn't take that long. And intelligent is very subjective. I'd say the dinosaurs were probably quite intelligent, but not smart enough to make tools or understand fission. That probably should've been addressed in the poll at the first, but wasn't. Assuming it takes 2 billion years for life capable of thought to evolve... and 1 billion after the big bang, and we round the life of the Universe up to 15 billion years, there's basically 12 billion years of possible intelligent life. However, the math would get extremely nasty here b/c you gotta think that only a select few places at a 1 billion year old universe could start the reaction... far, far fewer than today. The later ones that die actually bear newer galaxies (or the potential for them) at some point. In the universe's infancy you merely had less galaxies, and less potential spots for the possibility of life.

Again, I'm no scientist at all. Just an enthusiast, so, take all that w/ a shaker of salt. I would like to see some equations address the probability of life at different stages of the universes age, and how they've changed over time.

[CMoon]

And intelligent is very subjective.

This is something I've been thinking about lately, and not in the smart-ass kind of way. First off, there were non-human hominids using fire before human beings were on the scene. Who knows, maybe humans learned how to make fire from those other hominids.

There is an idea we have of intelligence, but it may not even be possible for us to grasp how much of it (and how much of who we are) is cultural. I saw a video recently on TED that showed some striking examples of learned behaviors from Bononbo chimpanzees and it made me start thinking about how different we really are from other primate species. There's been a lot of arguments that trained behaviors don't count as intelligence, but how much of our behavior is trained? It's easy to do things the same old way and hard to figure out something new...although humans do seem to have a knack for experimenting with old ideas.

Anyway, I thought I'd put up a link to that TED video, though it's 17 minutes long, so you have to be patient.

http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_savage_r ... write.html

[CMoon]

Another thought is that we could actually be alone in the universe in regard to intelligence. With some 600 million years of animal life, we've only seen intelligence like ours crop up once. In other words, it is a rare and metabolically expensive solution. Fast legs, large teeth, camouflage, etc.; these are the really common solutions that we see over and over. What's more, being multi-cellular seems to be a rare solution too. At least a couple billion years of single-celled evolution shows us that the microbes don't need us. Being bigger is not any sort of inevitable solution but only one freakish outlier that has proved to be moderately successful (though not in relative terms to the microbes.)

It seems enormously likely that if there is life out there in the universe, that by in large it would be simple and microbial.

[Randorama]

CMoon:

Trained behavior sounds deeply behaviorist (actually, *it is* behaviorism) and behaviorism has been proven to be utterly bonkers. It is not surprising that the link you posted involves Sue Rambaugh, who in the '70s came up with the Kanzi experiment, one of the "monkey see, monkey chat" bogus projects. I think that the Gazzaniga's paper I linked to (a few posts before) becomes rather relevant, at this point.

Now, as far as I can tell, Intelligence has something to do on how we face new problems, not how we are brainwashed to solve old ones by God/Marx/Pac-Man/Big Brother/Cthulhu to do so. Furthermore, even when we take a crack at old problems by using our fathers' holy methods! ("culture"), we still have to get a grasp of how these methods work. If anything, "culture" has a something to do with memory, which is somehow related (but certainly not corresponding to) intelligence, as one may learn from PSY 101.

Now, just to make some sci-fi, if some species does not do that and somehow they *are* intelligent, would we spot them? More precisely, would be able to spot the behavioral patterns of intelligent life-forms, if we really don't know how to label our intelligence, and very like compare this 'intelligence' thing against other possible instantiations of this complex property? Hence: if other intelligent life forms exist, would be able to spot them?

I'd definitely say no, as I get that whoever is looking for intelligent life forms does not know what would qualify as such. Smart Life out there exist, but do we have at least a fellow who's done PSY 101 to spot it?

[/Cynic grumbling mode off]

[Octopod]

Another thought is that we could actually be alone in the universe in regard to intelligence. With some 600 million years of animal life, we've only seen intelligence like ours crop up once. In other words, it is a rare and metabolically expensive solution. Fast legs, large teeth, camouflage, etc.; these are the really common solutions that we see over and over. What's more, being multi-cellular seems to be a rare solution too. At least a couple billion years of single-celled evolution shows us that the microbes don't need us. Being bigger is not any sort of inevitable solution but only one freakish outlier that has proved to be moderately successful (though not in relative terms to the microbes.)

It seems enormously likely that if there is life out there in the universe, that by in large it would be simple and microbial.

How are you measuring intelligence though? You could argue that other forms of intelligent life share this earth with us. Maybe if there is some other life out there they do not consider us intelligent life. Maybe they are to us as we are to dolphins or chimpanzees. Maybe they could contact us but do not see us as significant. Just a thought really.

[system11]

I think it would be rather short sighted to believe that in what appears to be an infinite space with unknown billions of stars and planets, that this is the only one with intelligent life on it. Thing is, even if it was especially common, such planets will be so very far away that meeting beings from them would seem unlikely - you'd need science that doesn't exist - like folding space in Event Horizon.

If on the incredibly unlikely off-chance, we do get a visit - I would expect them to be scientifically interested rather than warlike. The odds are that any hostile race would destroy itself to the point where exploring the stars is impossible, much like we are doing now.

[CMoon]

CMoon:

behaviorism has been proven to be utterly bonkers.

So has quantum mechanics, and that hasn't stopped anyone. Even worse, it might be true.

Not that I'd have any real investment in it, but I'd love to know why behaviorism is bonkers.

Now, as far as I can tell, Intelligence has something to do on how we face new problems, not how we are brainwashed to solve old ones by God/Marx/Pac-Man/Big Brother/Cthulhu to do so. Furthermore, even when we take a crack at old problems by using our fathers' holy methods! ("culture"), we still have to get a grasp of how these methods work. If anything, "culture" has a something to do with memory, which is somehow related (but certainly not corresponding to) intelligence, as one may learn from PSY 101.

So anyway, psychology is something I turned my back on well over a decade ago. To me it is too much philosophy, and philosophy is too much BS, but here goes. I agree that intelligence should be about solving novel problems, and this is something that humans ALSO fail at quite often. Note that corvids are actually surprisingly good at this. I don't really have any argument that trained behaviors are not necessarily the same as what we mean by intelligence, but instead offer the alternative that most human behaviors are ALSO trained behaviors. Culture is effectively a human only konami-code cheat that (via our language centers) allows us to utilize trained behaviors that have accumulated over a large geographical and temporal space. How often do Americans say 'You too!' as a nonsensical response because it is a trained behavior?

There is of course no (ethical) way to actually test native human intelligence (free from culture) at solving novel problems versus other species. Given innate, non-cultural advantages that some animals have (IE Chimps have better short term memory abilities than humans do); I wouldn't be surprised that stripped of culture, language and social 'networking' that humans would in fact perform poorer at raw intelligence tests than some other peak animals such as Dolphins.

Now, just to make some sci-fi, if some species does not do that and somehow they *are* intelligent, would we spot them? More precisely, would be able to spot the behavioral patterns of intelligent life-forms, if we really don't know how to label our intelligence, and very like compare this 'intelligence' thing against other possible instantiations of this complex property? Hence: if other intelligent life forms exist, would be able to spot them?

I guess my point being that I don't think we're capable of separating our identity and intelligence from our culture, but when we see similar signs of intelligence in other primates--WITHOUT the crutch of the super language center konami code--it does beg the question whether it is actually intelligence that separates us from other animals.

[neorichieb1971]

Life is just a consciousness to consume and re populate right?

Intelligent life isn't so intelligent. Its just a species that dictates there is more to life than the above. If by intelligent you mean a species that fucks over its own to get a 1up or an extra $, I don't think we would want to meet a species like that.

If 2 intergalactic intelligent species met, they would both unite to fight each other. Lets hope we are playing away when it happens, because we don't play well at home against each other. Besides I'd hate to see the white house get blown up again, its getting boring

[Randorama]

Not that I'd have any real investment in it, but I'd love to know why behaviorism is bonkers.

Please read here then. Boden (2008), an history on Cognitive Sciences, has 2 chapters on this as well.

So anyway, psychology is something I turned my back on well over a decade ago.

I agree, but the way you use the term 'culture' is a bit too vague, and is ironically strikingly similar to many social psychologists' use of the word. I actually think that PSY 101 is better than handwaving (looking for intelligence without bothering to define it), but it is still terrible, or most research about intelligence. To be honest, I would say that, if one takes in consideration what psychologists have to say about intelligence, one at least knows what not to look for, if one are looking for smart life forms.

I guess my point being that I don't think we're capable of separating our identity and intelligence from our culture, but when we see similar signs of intelligence in other primates--WITHOUT the crutch of the super language center konami code--it does beg the question whether it is actually intelligence that separates us from other animals.

I don't really think that Intelligence and Language are the only discriminating features. This is on obssession of western academic environments, and in the US you have the notorious party of "Syntax=Language" (Chomsky and buddies) which defends this position.
I remember that Stephen Gould once pointed out to human beings as likely the unique species which has frontal mating ('the missionary style', eh), so, does that count for our uniqueness?

The other point is that the whole 'trained' (by who? God?) point sounds to me like the dual argument of full innateness. To hammer the point, I think that intelligence is mostly about our ability (cultural, genetic, whatever) to solve novel problems via a piece-meal process of 'interpretation', meant in mathematical sense (e.g., understand a paragraph we've never read before). I don't think it's all about learning 'you too' (or whatever), and I also don't think that we have an innate concept of carburator (Jerry Fodor in Fodor 1998).


My biased guess is that if we want to look for intelligent life, we need a good guess about which processes count as complex, a form of thought. Language is just one aspect of a complex equation, I would argue.

Human beings think and can do that in various ways, and they can do it surprisingly well if put in place to do so, but are particularly poor when they are asked NOT TO use their abilities in solving problems.

There is a vast *psychological* literature based on showing that human beings can't think, which revolves around making the thought process virtually impossible and then asking for a fixed result which cannot be obtained. If we use a similar criteria to look for alien smart guys, I guess that nobody will qualify, especially if they are much different from us. Stenning & van Lambalgen (2008) is a (dense) book on this topic.

Just to be hopelessly boring, I really mean one thing: I can't see as impossible that other smart fellows exist out there (bloodf's comment sums it up for me), but would we be able to spot them? I'd say no to the second question, because we really are looking for results without asking ourselves about the processes that bring these results.

Apologies for being too generic, please ask me to clarify any point.


As per our much beloved uniqueness as a species...I remember Stephen Gould saying that 'the missionary' style (can't remember in which book) for reproduction is quite unique, am I having a false memory?

[GaijinPunch]

I remember that Stephen Gould once pointed out to human beings as likely the unique species which has frontal mating ('the missionary style', eh), so, does that count for our uniqueness?

We do?

My biased guess is that if we want to look for intelligent life, we need a good guess about which processes count as complex, a form of thought. Language is just one aspect of a complex equation, I would argue.

We are a very long way away from caring about any type of discrimination: most scientists would destroy a pair of pants if they even found microbial.

[Domino]

Terrible Thread.

Edit: I voted for I don't give a shit.

[robivy64]

I voted for I don't give a shit.

We don't give a shit.

[GaijinPunch]

I voted for I don't give a shit.

We don't give a shit.

Terrible Thread.

Would definitely be better if we bickered about poor black people that don't want to work.

[Randorama]

We do?

Ehi, boring positions are the new black!

But seriously, I think reading that we should be one of the very few species that can actually mate with partners facing each other,
due to our pelvis configuration.

(I am too embarassed to google for 'bonobo mating videos', though).

We are a very long way away from caring about any type of discrimination: most scientists would destroy a pair of pants if they even found microbial.

Just to know, are there any research projects looking for microbial life around? ([/too lazy to google]

[GaijinPunch]

Just to know, are there any research projects looking for microbial life around? ([/too lazy to google]

The Mars rovers were obviously searching for "whatever" which included microbial life. We don't have the technology to really detect anything without actually touching it, so that's about the only one I can think of.

The newest orbiting telescope, whose name escapes me, is specifically designed to search for Earth-like planets with a reported high level of accuracy (in determining their atmospheric contents). Of course, that doesn't mean life - just a higher possibility of life as we know it.

[BryanM]

How are you measuring intelligence though?

By the display of how deeply a species exploits natural phenomenon.

Perhaps water prevents this full stop (hence why we're not ruled over by squid) by completely killing the first steps of projectile weapons, which are a first step of "fiddling with shit now for a payoff later". Which is a bummer since it's possible the Europas are more common than Earths.

[linko9]

Don't see how water would prevent the development of intelligence. Many modern theories about the origin of human intelligence put a lot of emphasis on the development of language, and the creation of tools. If dolphins evolved to have opposable thumbs, they could follow the same path to intelligence. They've already got protolanguage, and they have a reason to develop tools, namely, hunting. Imagine dolphins with fish nets. A frightening thought.

[Octopod]

Imagine dolphins with fish nets. A frightening thought.

More frightening than monkeys with guns?

[monkeyman]

Imagine dolphins with fish nets. A frightening thought.

More frightening than monkeys with guns?

like this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkPIJq0-gwM

[BryanM]

Don't octopi use some tools? I think I heard a thing.

[xris]

There's a tropical octopus that'll break a coconut, hide it, and retrieve it later to sleep safely inside of it, hide it again. It's considered smart for this. It was on some science channel.
I have to figure out how to do that yooztube link, maybe an intelligent octopus can tell me about it one of these days.