Intelligence is an Evolutionary Dead End

[The Atheist]

I started a thread with this subject at Dawkins' forum many years ago.

Dawfins' fan club lost their **** over it at the time, but nothing convinced me I was wrong.

Now, I see NASA largely agrees: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2210/2210.10582.pdf

Quote:

We postulate that an existential disaster may lay in wait as our society advances exponentially towards space exploration, acting as the Great Filter: a phenomenon that wipes out civilizations before they can encounter each other, which may explain the cosmic silence.

Climate change is the obvious Great Filter we're charging towards.

[The Great Zaganza]

an old and not very clever argument.

I agree that intelligence, and in particular Written Language, circumvents Evolution by giving people a Peer Group that can be very different from their familiar group, both in space and time.

But there is no evidence that intelligence leads to extinction. And no reason to believe that humanity won't get to a new post-Climate Change equilibrium that will include Space Exploration.

[Dutchman]

Quote:

We postulate that an existential disaster may lay in wait....

But then again, it may not, of course.

[Darat]

Originally Posted by The Atheist

I started a thread with this subject at Dawkins' forum many years ago.

Dawfins' fan club lost their **** over it at the time, but nothing convinced me I was wrong.

Now, I see NASA largely agrees: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2210/2210.10582.pdf



Climate change is the obvious Great Filter we're charging towards.

Not a very original science fiction short story - and I don't like the dry academic style as it clashes with its moralising, reminds me of Campbell's influences.

[Darat]

Looks like they've published a sequel: https://www.researchgate.net/publica...Human_Survival

[rjh01]

If humans were a slightly more aggressive species then we would have wiped out ourselves using nuclear weapons. If we were less aggressive we would not have evolved so far.

[Dr.Sid]

Originally Posted by The Atheist

Climate change is the obvious Great Filter we're charging towards.

I totally agree. It's not the climate change though. Not just it. Any global problem increases severity of all other global problems. And we're in the end game. Covid was the last drop, and now it's all out of anyone's hands. I was saying before we won't see 2050. Today 2030 seems quite optimistic.
AI was supposed to be part of the problem. But also it could be the sole survivor of the collapse. Not if it happens this fast though. AI won't play any role.

[Thermal]

The trick with The Great Filter would hinge on whether a civilization could create a self-replicating mechanical or semi-organic AI that would supersede the civilization before it destroys itself. I guess weapons are easier to create, though, and would logically go to their crude extreme before the complexities of creating 'life' got nailed down.

[theprestige]

Blindsight, by Peter Watts

[The Great Zaganza]

Accelerando, by Charles Stross

[Myriad]

The underlying premise here appears to be that there are only two possibilities for the history of a sentient species. They either colonize the galaxy, or they destroy themselves. Since we estimate that it's likely that there have been other sentient species, but we don't detect them colonizing the galaxy, we should conclude they've all destroyed themselves.

I wonder why people at a space agency would promote cultural narratives that make colonizing the galaxy seem like the only alternative to extinction? You'd think people smart enough to work at a publicly funded space agency would have the imagination to apprehend a much greater variety of possibilities. What a mystery.

[Dr.Sid]

Originally Posted by Myriad

The underlying premise here appears to be that there are only two possibilities for the history of a sentient species. They either colonize the galaxy, or they destroy themselves. Since we estimate that it's likely that there have been other sentient species, but we don't detect them colonizing the galaxy, we should conclude they've all destroyed themselves.

I wonder why people at a space agency would promote cultural narratives that make colonizing the galaxy seem like the only alternative to extinction? You'd think people smart enough to work at a publicly funded space agency would have the imagination to apprehend a much greater variety of possibilities. What a mystery.

What other possibilities are there ?

[Thermal]

Originally Posted by Dr.Sid

What other possibilities are there ?

Exploring locally, but not attaining exponentially beyond ight speed travel to reach other inhabitable planets?

[Myriad]

Originally Posted by Dr.Sid

What other possibilities are there ?

Survive and adapt. Invent a sustainable civilization. Or don't, and continue with history as we know it, collapsing and recovering countless thousands more times over hundreds of millions of years.

If you're concerned with deep time "Earth will eventually become uninhabitable or the sun go nova" scenarios... when it gets to that point, gracefully die out. Or, if "we" must (the scare quotes are because on that time scale it's unlikely that our eventual descendants would resemble ourselves very much), migrate or colonize. The Fermi paradox doesn't arise from one migration per half billion years.

[theprestige]

Exploring locally is about all you can do, without getting into deep time projects and some form of technology indistinguishable from magic (whether it's FTL, immortality, hibernation, or generation ships).

[Cat Not Included]

Originally Posted by Dr.Sid

What other possibilities are there ?

It may simply be that long distance space travel is just not reasonably feasible, ever.

Of course, while I personally find it unlikely, if a civilization did send out scouts or something, if they'd gone past Earth anytime other than in the last two hundred years or so we'd never know.

There could be dozens of solar powered micro-satellites going by on a regular basis and we wouldn't know about them.

Not that I think either of these things are particularly likely, but they are within the realm of possibility.

[p0lka]

Originally Posted by Dr.Sid

What other possibilities are there ?

Hiding your signals,
because there's something out there?

[Lithrael]

VS Fermi Paradox there’s also the idea that if the universe is pretty young (for a universe) that we might be among the first and that’s a factor in why there’s no advanced civ’s whizzing around where we can see them.

Anyway 2050 is ridiculously pessimistic. Short of major nuclear fuckups we are simply not making the entire planet literally uninhabitable. In for a ****** time, sure.

[lobosrul5]

Originally Posted by Lithrael

VS Fermi Paradox there’s also the idea that if the universe is pretty young (for a universe) that we might be among the first and that’s a factor in why there’s no advanced civ’s whizzing around where we can see them.

Anyway 2050 is ridiculously pessimistic. Short of major nuclear fuckups we are simply not making the entire planet literally uninhabitable. In for a ****** time, sure.

I think that given the vastness of time and the vastness of the universe, there were, or will be, myriad advanced species/societies. But at any given time in the relatively small corner of one galaxy that we would likely receive signals from or be able to travel to, we're totally alone. And with as many galaxies as there are, there probably will be, or probably once was, a society very much like The Federation in Star Trek. If FTL travel is indeed possible. But 99.9999999999999% of galaxies will never have that.

As bad as climate change can make things I can't possibly seeing it killing more than ohh, about 80% of us.

[theprestige]

Originally Posted by p0lka

Hiding your signals,
because there's something out there?

I figure by the time we have a signal actually worth hiding, from someone actually worth worrying about, we'll either have noticed them already, or they aren't there, or we'll be peers anyway.

[Darat]

Originally Posted by p0lka

Hiding your signals,
because there's something out there?

Probably happens already, after a brief explosion of high powered analogue broadcasts digital, directed signals will take over which are less powerful in terms of broadcasting.

Probably the thing we couldn’t hide would be the change in our atmosphere caused by industrialisation, but I don’t know what the theoretical limits in terms of distance would be for detecting such a change.

[The Atheist]

Originally Posted by Dutchman

But then again, it may not, of course.

Quite right!

Long time, few posts, I see, nice to see you joining in.

Originally Posted by Dr.Sid

I totally agree. It's not the climate change though. Not just it. Any global problem increases severity of all other global problems. And we're in the end game. Covid was the last drop, and now it's all out of anyone's hands. I was saying before we won't see 2050. Today 2030 seems quite optimistic.

I think that's quite pessimistic, but your premise is right - everything gets amplified. CO2 gets higher and people get dumber.

Originally Posted by Thermal

The trick with The Great Filter would hinge on whether a civilization could create a self-replicating mechanical or semi-organic AI that would supersede the civilization before it destroys itself. I guess weapons are easier to create, though, and would logically go to their crude extreme before the complexities of creating 'life' got nailed down.

Sex robots already exist. We're saved!

Originally Posted by lobosrul5

As bad as climate change can make things I can't possibly seeing it killing more than ohh, about 80% of us.

Which would be way more than enough. Without infrastructure, probably 99% of the remainder would die out.

[arthwollipot]

ETA: never mind. Factual error, caught too late.

[jrhowell]

Originally Posted by p0lka

Hiding your signals,
because there's something out there?

They may be hiding in plain sight. It turns out that as photon based communication becomes more efficient it also becomes indistinguishable from random noise.

[arthwollipot]

I've long been of the opinion that intelligence is an evolutionary dead end, but for a different reason. Intelligence means that we are modifying our environment to suit ourselves, rather than evolving to suit our environment. Evolution is more or less stable when you don't have to adapt to a changing environment, and it is by technology, rather than by biological adaptation, that humans have occupied all kinds of terrain and climate.

[rjh01]

There is another possibility. Intelligent life does exist elsewhere. The problem is that going from one star to another in this region is impossible. Radio communication is also impossible as it is not designed to travel several light years and still be heard above background levels.

[Dr.Sid]

Originally Posted by arthwollipot

I've long been of the opinion that intelligence is an evolutionary dead end, but for a different reason. Intelligence means that we are modifying our environment to suit ourselves, rather than evolving to suit our environment. Evolution is more or less stable when you don't have to adapt to a changing environment, and it is by technology, rather than by biological adaptation, that humans have occupied all kinds of terrain and climate.

That's very limiting view of evolution. Evolution of genome ? True. Evolution of mankind ? No ! For us the culture (ie. memes in the original sense) is more important. Medicine evolves today .. not genes. We move toward AI .. and if it kills us .. is it failure of mankind or just a next step ? IMHO the later.

[The Atheist]

Originally Posted by arthwollipot

I've long been of the opinion that intelligence is an evolutionary dead end, but for a different reason. Intelligence means that we are modifying our environment to suit ourselves, rather than evolving to suit our environment.

Looks like the same reason to me.

[arthwollipot]

Originally Posted by The Atheist

Looks like the same reason to me.

Really? Seems to me that most of the rest of the thread is about intelligence being a dead end because it is pushing us towards a Great Filter.

[The Atheist]

I think what you described is a good precis of what form the event/filter will take.

[arthwollipot]

Originally Posted by The Atheist

I think what you described is a good precis of what form the event/filter will take.

I'm not following you. What I'm describing is not any kind of event or filter, just the idea that evolution would stop affecting the human species.

[The Atheist]

Originally Posted by arthwollipot

I'm not following you. What I'm describing is not any kind of event or filter, just the idea that evolution would stop affecting the human species.

Ok, I'll try to explain.

My premise was always that intelligence inevitably leads to outcomes that are bad for survival as a species. We extend life expectancy by 30 years and create over-population. We get lazy and create pollution and carbon emissions. We want to grow food by the easiest method and contaminate the tiny layer of soil we rely on. We use pesticides and kill pollinators.

The selfish gene in action is how I see it. I don't think there's a specific event as such, but there's a tipping point, which is probably a combination of many factors and it feels to like we're charging towards it as fast as possible.

It just looked like what you're saying fits that scenario, because the fastest way to stop evolving is to die off.

[Thor 2]

On another tack, it occurs to me that our intelligent application of science, to medicine and surgical intervention, ensures that weaker people survive, thus ensuring the survival of these weaknesses.

[arthwollipot]

Okay, but I think it's possible for there to be an equilibrium that can be reached. We're starting to realise how much we're changing the climate, and starting to do some things to mitigate that. Population will reach a maximum and plateau out.

I think that if the human race is going to die off, it'll take a very long time. Intelligence is causing us problems, yes, but it is the application of that intelligence that will solve those problems.

[Dr.Sid]

Originally Posted by Thor 2

On another tack, it occurs to me that our intelligent application of science, to medicine and surgical intervention, ensures that weaker people survive, thus ensuring the survival of these weaknesses.

Only weaknesses that are no issue. So it's actually the same as without medicine. We are increasingly dependent on the medicine though, which might be an issue.

[The Atheist]

Originally Posted by Dr.Sid

Only weaknesses that are no issue. So it's actually the same as without medicine. We are increasingly dependent on the medicine though, which might be an issue.

I think it's very clear that antibiotic resistance is going to cause major trouble during this century.

[The Great Zaganza]

Originally Posted by Thor 2

On another tack, it occurs to me that our intelligent application of science, to medicine and surgical intervention, ensures that weaker people survive, thus ensuring the survival of these weaknesses.

Or, to put it another way, genetic diversity.
I believe that most medical progress in the 21st century will be identifying and transferring Natural resistances to diseases from one population to another.

[Cat Not Included]

Originally Posted by The Atheist

Ok, I'll try to explain.

My premise was always that intelligence inevitably leads to outcomes that are bad for survival as a species. We extend life expectancy by 30 years and create over-population. We get lazy and create pollution and carbon emissions. We want to grow food by the easiest method and contaminate the tiny layer of soil we rely on. We use pesticides and kill pollinators.

The selfish gene in action is how I see it. I don't think there's a specific event as such, but there's a tipping point, which is probably a combination of many factors and it feels to like we're charging towards it as fast as possible.

It just looked like what you're saying fits that scenario, because the fastest way to stop evolving is to die off.

Outside of humans, what species that appear to be reasonably intelligent (for example, crows) have caused outcomes that have been bad for them as a species?

Lots of species go extinct. We humans have made it way worse (perhaps if those other species were more intelligent they might be surviving the problems we're causing better?), but from what I can find, scientists estimate the "typical" extinction rate pre-human was about 1 species going extinct per 1 million existing species per year. There are currently around 8 million species, so we can expect about 8 going extinct per year. Do "intelligent" species do any worse than that?

We haven't found evidence of any other intelligent life in the universe so far...but we haven't found evidence of any non-intelligent life either.

[theprestige]

LOL "overpopulation". We have not even begun to overpopulate.

[Cat Not Included]

Originally Posted by Thor 2

On another tack, it occurs to me that our intelligent application of science, to medicine and surgical intervention, ensures that weaker people survive, thus ensuring the survival of these weaknesses.

"weaker" is an extremely relative term. More variety gives more genetic diversity. "Strength" is only relative to a specific environment, and overspecialization can be devastating to a species when something changes the environment.