Videos

First of all, this has been the most interesting and constructive response I have ever gotten on social media, bar none. Thank you for taking the time - I really appreciate it.

The idea I am applying is the fitness landscape. I know you know what I mean by that, but for anyone else who is happy to follow along a nerdy discussion on a post that has about three comments and seven upvotes, biology pictures systems as climbing up hills on a landscape that’s filled with mountains and valleys. It’s the same idea that physicists use to demonstrate minimizing energy by having marbles rolling downhill, except with the opposite direction. Higher means more fit, which in the simplest possible terms means having more offspring.

One question that we try to address is by what mechanism do organisms cross valleys. In one sense, we know that they can’t really be becoming “less fit” in a way that would drive them to extinction based on some future plan - the math doesn’t work like that. On the other hand, we can acknowledge that there’s a significant cost associated with developing some adaptations. The costs do have to be paid in real time, but on the other hand selection is a fickle process that has a significant noise component.

Two of the developments that have interested me are eusociality (eg ants and bees as well as pro-social behaviors in general) and the development of technological intelligence. Fortunately for me, these have come together in humans. Here’s the issue: baby humans are useless. They’re food, at best. Their bobble heads are ridiculously large, and it takes them years to even learn how to walk, much less do anything socially useful.

This creates a significant valley around what we currently believe to be a very high fitness peak. The landscape we’re talking about here is a naive construct, though, and doesn’t perfectly describe what actually constitutes fitness for humans. Instead, we need to factor in the co-evolution of social structures. There is a strong argument that the size and capacity of the human brain was in no small part developed as part of an arms race in sociological development between cooperation and exploitation.

In any case, we’ve seen both sociality and eusociality evolve independently multiple times. Still, we haven’t seen human levels of social learning. We see social learning in some mammals as well as a surprising (but still tiny) number of other species. Being a theorist, I like to fold these examples together with phenomena like DNA exchanges and so on, but at the bottom of the technological intelligence argument it’s still n=1. And the compelling piece, for me, is that technological intelligence led to the complete domination of the planetary ecosystem. If this had come about earlier, it would have. This signifies, to me, that the valley surrounding the very high peak that is technological intelligence is very deep indeed and requires the coevolution of a high degree of socialization, and quite possibly excludes organisms that due to size (like insects) or environment (like octopuses) can’t do things like carry a burning branch.

It’s still an open question, of course, but for me the fundamental physics (for want of a better term capturing the mathematics of these systems) make me absolutely reject the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence being behind things like UFO sightings. The point made in the video is that while we can calculate the number of stars or planets in the galaxy or the universe, we literally have no idea about the other, equally important component, which is the probability of life (or intelligent life) existing on another planet. If the number of planets is 10^15 but the probability of technological intelligence evolving is 10^50, it’s entirely trivial to say that we are all that there is when it comes to the universe contemplating itself.