On Aug 13, 9:58*pm, Timberwoof
wrote:
In article ,
*Chris L Peterson wrote:



On Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:12:57 -0700, "K_h" wrote:

This contradiction can be resolved if the origin of life is far harder than
commonly believed...

My thinking is that life is easy, and probably common. It's the part
about it becoming (technologically) intelligent that's more likely to be
difficult and rare.

I see nothing to suggest that there are many species on Earth poised to
become technological given a few million years of evolution. Most
species have been around and stable for at least that long. Given the
vast numbers of species on Earth, living and extinct, and the presence
of only one technological one- which happens to be of very recent origin
and likely on the edge of extinction itself- that seems like the weak
link in the Drake chain, and therefore a reasonable answer to the Fermi
Paradox.

I suspect that just as when one system of biochemistry establishes the
pattern of life, things that use it will eat anything else that shows
up, it is likely that when one highly intelligent species shows up, it
will limit the opportunities for anything else to evolve into sentience.


I am not a scientist, but I get the notion that that applies to niches
in general: organisms will usually be more successful if they find a
new niche, or an underutilized one, than if they try to horn in on a
niche that already has well-adapted occupants.

The final events that drove human evolution to intelligence were all
climatic changes. For example, when forests of Africa became savannah,
the apes that lived there had to adapt, and they ended up going down the
road to high intelligence. It's interesting to note that this also
happened only in once place, and then humans spread out to everywhere.

There are plenty of species running around on the Earth now that are at
about the level of intelligence of our ancestors, oh, twenty million
years ago. They're not likely to develop to sentience any time soon, and
certainly not while we're around unless we help them. (David Brin has
written science fiction novels around that concept ... in his universe
we're a rare event, independently developed sentience. That causes a lot
of political trouble for us in the interstellar culture.) But if we were
to off ourselves suddenly, the Earth would heal and something might have
a chance to develop sentience.

--
Timberwoof me at timberwoof dot comhttp://www.timberwoof.com
People who can't spell get kicked out of Hogwarts.

Eric Root