First Contact

[Sciolist]

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i mean something big, like what if a giant meteor hits and blots out the sun or increases the temperature drastically or causes us to breath horribly polluted air or.....(you get the point)

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Well, I think that counts as our civilisation not continuing as we know it. I also think that in about ~100 years, those things will not become problems: We'll be able to track and stop meteors, and we'll be able to either alter the chemical composition of the appropriate parts of our atmosphere or build mirrors etc to reflect more heat. I think we're at the last stage of our civilisation where an external threat can kill us: From here on in, it's either something really big (like nearby gamma ray burst), or something we generated that kills us off.

[Jamougha]

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Selection will be on the basis of what makes you attractive to the opposite sex, there'll be no/much less selection on other terms.

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Not sure the part about sexual selection this is true. Since we have the ability to more-or-less control our reproduction the amount of partners you have isn't necessarily important.

It would be interesting to see what attributes correlate with family size. I suspect intelligence, for example, is negatively correlated with number of children. In that case it may be that our current technological civilisation is unsustainable without genetic tinkering.

Still, most likely some random unpredictable event will make all this speculation worthless.

[Sciolist]

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Not sure the part about sexual selection this is true. Since we have the ability to more-or-less control our reproduction the amount of partners you have isn't necessarily important.

It would be interesting to see what attributes correlate with family size. I suspect intelligence, for example, is negatively correlated with number of children. In that case it may be that our current technological civilisation is unsustainable without genetic tinkering.

Still, most likely some random unpredictable event will make all this speculation worthless.

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This is probably true, plus we'll be able to change our appearence pretty soon (some already can obviously). Attractive people are more likely to get married to attractive people though, that's still the case, so I think we'll still select on this for some time yet, it's just not a strategy that applies to the whole population.

The way I understand it, intelligence is at least partly a function of nutrition as a child. Therefore the richer the poor are (in real, rather than compared to the rich), the higher the average intelligence of the civilisation. We're really only in the second or third generation where most of the people in the first world get sufficient nutrition as a child. With increased awareness of what good nutrition means, and with more people being in a position to provide it, I think we're going to see the average intelligence continue to rise for a while yet.

I think you're right that less intelligent people are more likely to have more children though. I don't really know why... I guess if you have take two people who appear to be equally fit to breed. One of them is smart, one is dumb. They both have the same urge to breed, but the smarter person does it in accordance with his means, whilst the dumb doesn't. The dumb one ends up poorer and with a bigger family.

That's all off the cuff though, dunno if that's how things really work...

Finally, another factor in favour of the average attractiveness of the population rising is that children with very widely removed parents tend to be better looking. I think this is a function of lack of inbreeding: If your mother is Swedish and your father Brazilian, your gene pool hasn't mixed for thousands of years, so there's a lot of variation. As the world becomes smaller, the more weird mixes we'll come up with, so the better the gene pool is mixed, and the more attractive the children.

[morphball]

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I think the only area we know less about than alien cultures and technology is what happens to people after they die.

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blutarski, we know quite a bit about happens to people after they die. Generally, they stop moving and begin to rot. I know you're referring to the question of is there life after death, but we can be extremely certain that there is not. I suspect people who argue differently will end up relying on "faith" instead of logic and/or evidence.

I think the SETI program is waste of time as well, and I agree with all of the reasons that posters here have stated. I add that people should consider the possibility that other civilizations may not want to be discovered for various reasons including: scarcity of resources, ideology, conflict, etc.

I disagree with intelligent civilization and technology being being rare. It seems it is inevitable. The single biggest milestone in the evolution of life on earth is the eukaryotic expansion, or the arrival of complex cells with internal membranes.

I suspect that as we learn more about life and evolution, we'll see that (assuming sufficient resources) once complex cells form, multi-cellular forms of life are inevitable, once multi-cellular life exists, intelligence is inevitable.

[Sciolist]

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The single biggest milestone in the evolution of life on earth is the eukaryotic expansion, or the arrival of complex cells with internal membranes.

I suspect that as we learn more about life and evolution, we'll see that (assuming sufficient resources) once complex cells form, multi-cellular forms of life are inevitable, once multi-cellular life exists, intelligence is inevitable.

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This is something I know nothing about, but why do we not have the simple pre-RNA replicators still around? Why aren't they spontaneously appearing all over the place? Would they be competing with what're now more efficient organisms, or are conditions just too far removed from what they need to be for them to reappear?

Also, why can't we create them in the lab yet?

I doubt we'll know how hard it is to evolve intelligent life until we understand what consciousness is and how it comes about, and that's probably a few hundred years off...

[Borodog]

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The galaxy is only of order 100,000 light years across. Even at very slow speeds, it would only take tens of millions of years at worst.

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This is really an entirely seperate thread, but it's a lot, lot harder than you think. Carrying the fuel, building things that last that long, preserving yourself against interstellar dust at those speeds, having that kind of technology: It's all really, really hard. It's certainly nowhere near anything we're able to do.

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I don't think you understand the time frames involved.

It doesn't matter if it takes another thousand years, or ten thousand. That's blink of an eye to the galaxy.

Personally, I think the entirety of possible technological "phase space" will certainly be accessible within 100 years. Which is not to say that capital will be available to do anything that is conceivable at that time.

But certainly, on the time scales of the galaxy, technological spacefaring species should colonize them like mold on cheese.

[Borodog]

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once multi-cellular life exists, intelligence is inevitable.

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I'll buy everything else you said, but I can find no justification for this other than wishful thinking.

[bekman]

My line of thinking was more on the pathway of when we do meet more intelligent life, will we know what they are saying/doing here or even try to learn the language... versus us trying to teach them our language. I believe that our inability to understand the pets that we spend the most time with (aside from the nonverbal stress based communication already mentioned by someone else) means that chances are good that we will lack the ability to communicate with any foreign planet's life either.

[Jamougha]

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The galaxy is only of order 100,000 light years across. Even at very slow speeds, it would only take tens of millions of years at worst.

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This is really an entirely seperate thread, but it's a lot, lot harder than you think. Carrying the fuel, building things that last that long, preserving yourself against interstellar dust at those speeds, having that kind of technology: It's all really, really hard. It's certainly nowhere near anything we're able to do.

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I don't think you understand the time frames involved.

It doesn't matter if it takes another thousand years, or ten thousand. That's blink of an eye to the galaxy.

Personally, I think the entirety of possible technological "phase space" will certainly be accessible within 100 years. Which is not to say that capital will be available to do anything that is conceivable at that time.

But certainly, on the time scales of the galaxy, technological spacefaring species should colonize them like mold on cheese.

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To do this the population of the species has to keep expanding exponentially for millions of years. However if a species does not rech a stable level of population relatively early in it's technological civilisation then it's likely that the species will collapse it's environment before reaching the point of interstellar travel.

[morphball]

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once multi-cellular life exists, intelligence is inevitable.

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I'll buy everything else you said, but I can find no justification for this other than wishful thinking.

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Yes and No. Maybe I was too broad, but once you have a multi-cellular organisms capable of movement, then you are going to get nerve cells, or the like, which will lead to intelligence.

But then again, maybe it's a fallacy to think our intelligence is special, maybe we evolved on earth because it's standard ordinary evolutionary fare.

And I pretty much think this entire thread is wishful thinking which makes it so fun... [img]/images/graemlins/cool.gif[/img]