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glaurungIt's a great pity that most SF geeks and space nerds are far more interested in physics, chemistry, and engineering than in biology or evolution. The Fermi Paradox keeps popping up on the blogs I follow, and every time I shake my head at the colossal ignorance of people's assumptions about how likely it is for a life-bearing exoplanet to evolve sapience.
The Fermi paradox observes that there's a high probability of life beyond the Earth in the galaxy, and then asks, "why aren't we seeing any evidence of alien civilizations?"
Exoplanet astronomy has progressed to the point where we know that nearly all stars have solar systems. Even if you assume that only 1 in 100,000 stars has a solar system with a planet hospitable to life, you still have 1 million earthlike planets in the galaxy. And from what we know of the evolution of life on Earth, life forms almost automatically given a world with liquid water on its surface. We know that multicellular life evolved several times in Earth's history, as did land life. So those are also nearly guaranteed given an earthlike world.
The big unknown is photosynthesis - it evolved only once as best we can tell, early in Earth's history but not right away. Only after a few billion years of continuous photosynthesis created an oxygen rich atmosphere did life on earth become multicellular. If photosynthesis here came about through a lucky coincidence, then most life bearing worlds will have bacteria-only ecosystems. If photosynthesis is an almost inevitable invention once life gets started, then nearly every earthlike world that's more than 4 billion years old will have an oxygen atmosphere and a rich ecoystem of creatures like the one we have here.
If we ignore the vast number of unknown factors that might keep an earthlike world from acquiring a diverse and full ecosystem like our own, and just focus on the (probably) thousands of worlds that have evolved complex life forms, we get to the real issue that I wanted to talk about -- Fermi, and many other extremely intelligent and educated people, have all jumped straight over the evolution of sapience, taking it as an inevitable given, without really thinking about it properly.
Elephants mourn their dead. Humpback whales have incredibly complex songs that we are only now learning how to hear and analyze, and they exhibit altruism, thwarting the preying of their orca relatives against seals and other species.
Clearly elephants and whales are among the most intelligent species on the planet. Yet both have been decimated by human predation. They have been unable to act in a coordinated manner in response to our wholesale murder of their kind, either to flee and avoid us or to defend themselves. If sapience is something that just evolves gradually and inevitably over time, then we'd see more evidence of beings other than us that can organize and coordinate their behaviour, especially in response to threats.
Instead, there's a quantum leap in mentation between other smart creatures and us. And when we see a quantum leap in evolution, we are seeing the result of a genetic bottleneck, a period of (relatively) rapid change in response to dire selective pressure. 99% of species die out rather than make it past the bottleneck.
A definition, cribbed and grossly simplified from The Symbolic Species by Terrence Deacon: sapience is the ability to think symbolically, to use abstract language (human language being a quantum leap towards greater complexity and versatility compared to all the animal languages we have studied). Everything else we label as human (tool making, tech, behavior, culture, society) grows out of the ability to think and communicate in an abstract, complex manner. Deacon's book makes a very persuasive case that a quantum jump in language and symbolic thinking came first.
Postponing consideration of Deacon's argument as to how and why our ancestors underwent a radical change in how they communicated, consider some alternative scenarios for evolutionary history on earth:
If whales became sapient, they would develop a lovely and complex oral culture. But past that? No hands, no access to fire: they would never be able to develop technology.
If elephants became sapient would they have been able to harness fire? Knapp flints to make tools? Just how far would they be able to develop their technology with only their trunks to work with?
From another direction, think of species that require specific habitats or specific foods. Imagine smart pandas with fully functional opposable thumbs. Or smart Koala bears. There's nothing to stop them from developing high technology, but they will never be able to live on any food other than the singular one they are adapted to eat. Could they develop a global civilization? Think how fragile their survival would be - climate change or a virulent tree disease could wipe out most of their food supply, with massive population decline and the collapse of their civilization.
We are used to thinking that of course smart beings could adapt to any environment, of course they would spread across their world, but that's because we have done so. Some species are adaptable to varied environments, some aren't. Compare a few of our closest relatives: as we have destroyed their tropical forest homes, chimpanzees have begun to find ways to live in scrub and savannah environments, but we haven't had enough time to learn if they're finding those new habitats viable or not for long term survival. Gorillas, on the other hand, have continued to live only in their traditional (ever smaller) forest habitats. Meanwhile, rhesus macaques have spread far and wide across Asia, thriving in a huge range of habitats. Imagine macaques with language and the technology to make clothes and you get, well, us. Imagine chimpanzees with language and they might spread across the world, or they might not. But if gorillas had developed language instead of humans, would they have spread across the world, or would they have stayed in the places they regard as home?
The speculative ETs in the Fermi Paradox are ETs that can either travel between the stars or send signals between the stars for us to hear. They can't just be smart, they have to be tool using, civilization-building creatures. They have to either possess a wanderlust that sends them into space and across interstellar distances, or a philosophical bent that causes them to want to speak to their fellow sapients elsewhere in the galaxy.
So from the thousands of worlds in this galaxy plausibly possessed of complex multicellular life, we have to narrow it down to however many worlds harbour life that made it through the quantum leap bottleneck to achieve sapience, and then narrow it again to however many of those sapient species happen to also benefit from being land dwellers, being possessed of dextrous paws or tentacles or whatever capable of making tools, and being possessed of a mindset that causes them to do something (say, build giant radio transmitters in orbit and start broadcasting a "we are here" signal to the cosmos) that could potentially be seen by us. Looking at the variety of creatures on earth, and how few of them are possessed of the ability to build tools even if they had the brains to do so, it seems safe to assume that less than one in a thousand sapient species in the cosmos are going to be civilized.
And how likely is it that the ones that are capable of civilization will be interested in the same philosophical questions as us, interested enough to make the effort to be noticed by the rest of the cosmos? So my answer to the Fermi Paradox is that even if sapience is a common evolutionary choice, it's entirely possible and even likely that we are either the only or one of the only civilizations in our own galaxy. No wonder we aren't finding any ETs out there.
Next time, hopefully soon, I'll talk more about The Symbolic Species and how likely it was for us to get past that evolutionary bottleneck.
The Fermi paradox observes that there's a high probability of life beyond the Earth in the galaxy, and then asks, "why aren't we seeing any evidence of alien civilizations?"
Exoplanet astronomy has progressed to the point where we know that nearly all stars have solar systems. Even if you assume that only 1 in 100,000 stars has a solar system with a planet hospitable to life, you still have 1 million earthlike planets in the galaxy. And from what we know of the evolution of life on Earth, life forms almost automatically given a world with liquid water on its surface. We know that multicellular life evolved several times in Earth's history, as did land life. So those are also nearly guaranteed given an earthlike world.
The big unknown is photosynthesis - it evolved only once as best we can tell, early in Earth's history but not right away. Only after a few billion years of continuous photosynthesis created an oxygen rich atmosphere did life on earth become multicellular. If photosynthesis here came about through a lucky coincidence, then most life bearing worlds will have bacteria-only ecosystems. If photosynthesis is an almost inevitable invention once life gets started, then nearly every earthlike world that's more than 4 billion years old will have an oxygen atmosphere and a rich ecoystem of creatures like the one we have here.
If we ignore the vast number of unknown factors that might keep an earthlike world from acquiring a diverse and full ecosystem like our own, and just focus on the (probably) thousands of worlds that have evolved complex life forms, we get to the real issue that I wanted to talk about -- Fermi, and many other extremely intelligent and educated people, have all jumped straight over the evolution of sapience, taking it as an inevitable given, without really thinking about it properly.
Elephants mourn their dead. Humpback whales have incredibly complex songs that we are only now learning how to hear and analyze, and they exhibit altruism, thwarting the preying of their orca relatives against seals and other species.
Clearly elephants and whales are among the most intelligent species on the planet. Yet both have been decimated by human predation. They have been unable to act in a coordinated manner in response to our wholesale murder of their kind, either to flee and avoid us or to defend themselves. If sapience is something that just evolves gradually and inevitably over time, then we'd see more evidence of beings other than us that can organize and coordinate their behaviour, especially in response to threats.
Instead, there's a quantum leap in mentation between other smart creatures and us. And when we see a quantum leap in evolution, we are seeing the result of a genetic bottleneck, a period of (relatively) rapid change in response to dire selective pressure. 99% of species die out rather than make it past the bottleneck.
A definition, cribbed and grossly simplified from The Symbolic Species by Terrence Deacon: sapience is the ability to think symbolically, to use abstract language (human language being a quantum leap towards greater complexity and versatility compared to all the animal languages we have studied). Everything else we label as human (tool making, tech, behavior, culture, society) grows out of the ability to think and communicate in an abstract, complex manner. Deacon's book makes a very persuasive case that a quantum jump in language and symbolic thinking came first.
Postponing consideration of Deacon's argument as to how and why our ancestors underwent a radical change in how they communicated, consider some alternative scenarios for evolutionary history on earth:
If whales became sapient, they would develop a lovely and complex oral culture. But past that? No hands, no access to fire: they would never be able to develop technology.
If elephants became sapient would they have been able to harness fire? Knapp flints to make tools? Just how far would they be able to develop their technology with only their trunks to work with?
From another direction, think of species that require specific habitats or specific foods. Imagine smart pandas with fully functional opposable thumbs. Or smart Koala bears. There's nothing to stop them from developing high technology, but they will never be able to live on any food other than the singular one they are adapted to eat. Could they develop a global civilization? Think how fragile their survival would be - climate change or a virulent tree disease could wipe out most of their food supply, with massive population decline and the collapse of their civilization.
We are used to thinking that of course smart beings could adapt to any environment, of course they would spread across their world, but that's because we have done so. Some species are adaptable to varied environments, some aren't. Compare a few of our closest relatives: as we have destroyed their tropical forest homes, chimpanzees have begun to find ways to live in scrub and savannah environments, but we haven't had enough time to learn if they're finding those new habitats viable or not for long term survival. Gorillas, on the other hand, have continued to live only in their traditional (ever smaller) forest habitats. Meanwhile, rhesus macaques have spread far and wide across Asia, thriving in a huge range of habitats. Imagine macaques with language and the technology to make clothes and you get, well, us. Imagine chimpanzees with language and they might spread across the world, or they might not. But if gorillas had developed language instead of humans, would they have spread across the world, or would they have stayed in the places they regard as home?
The speculative ETs in the Fermi Paradox are ETs that can either travel between the stars or send signals between the stars for us to hear. They can't just be smart, they have to be tool using, civilization-building creatures. They have to either possess a wanderlust that sends them into space and across interstellar distances, or a philosophical bent that causes them to want to speak to their fellow sapients elsewhere in the galaxy.
So from the thousands of worlds in this galaxy plausibly possessed of complex multicellular life, we have to narrow it down to however many worlds harbour life that made it through the quantum leap bottleneck to achieve sapience, and then narrow it again to however many of those sapient species happen to also benefit from being land dwellers, being possessed of dextrous paws or tentacles or whatever capable of making tools, and being possessed of a mindset that causes them to do something (say, build giant radio transmitters in orbit and start broadcasting a "we are here" signal to the cosmos) that could potentially be seen by us. Looking at the variety of creatures on earth, and how few of them are possessed of the ability to build tools even if they had the brains to do so, it seems safe to assume that less than one in a thousand sapient species in the cosmos are going to be civilized.
And how likely is it that the ones that are capable of civilization will be interested in the same philosophical questions as us, interested enough to make the effort to be noticed by the rest of the cosmos? So my answer to the Fermi Paradox is that even if sapience is a common evolutionary choice, it's entirely possible and even likely that we are either the only or one of the only civilizations in our own galaxy. No wonder we aren't finding any ETs out there.
Next time, hopefully soon, I'll talk more about The Symbolic Species and how likely it was for us to get past that evolutionary bottleneck.
Photosynthetic pigments
Date: 2016-10-23 01:07 am (UTC)Mia
(no subject)
Date: 2017-10-01 05:03 pm (UTC)---
I have really lost patience with the Fermi Paradox lately. It’s only a paradox for people with no real understanding of evolution.
Evolution isn’t teleological, it’s random. This time, here, two legged apes with opposable thumbs evolved sapience. Some other time or place, maybe whales evolved sapience, or elephants. There’s no guarantee that sapience is going to come with a package of manipulatory organs suited to knapping flint, building fire, forging metal, and so on through the technological chain up to building radio telescopes and sending out space ships.
Consider our closest relatives, chimps and gorillas. In response to habitat destruction, gorillas have become more rare - despite being only 1% different from us genetically, they don’t seem able to adapt to new environments. Chimps have managed to diversify from forest dwelling to scrub and savanna dwelling now that humans have come along and chopped down most of their forests. But they never spread out to cover the entire world the way we did. We’re a lot more like rhesus macaques, eager to spread throughout the world and able to put down roots wherever we find ourselves. There’s no guarantee that a sapient ET species is going to be as aggressive at expanding its range as we are, as interested in exploring and colonizing as we are. If they turn out to be homebodies like gorillas or chimps, then they’re probably never going to make spaceships.
Consider sapient pandas or sapient koalas: restricted to a single food source, how easy would it be for a plant disease or an ice age to wreak havoc on their food supply and wipe out their civilization.
What I’m trying to get at is that it’s not just sapience, it’s a big package of multiple attributes that humans just happen to have in combination by random chance, including sapience, which have enabled us to build our civilization and have arguments about Fermi’s paradox on the internet. Another planet with multicellular life is not going to necessarily come up with a similar full package by random chance. But you need a compatible package of many attributes beyond sapience to get ET civilizations capable of and interested in broadcasting evidence of their existence that we could detect.
And we haven’t even touched on the likelihood of evolving sapience. Elephants mourn their dead. Humpback whales have incredibly complex songs that we are only now learning how to hear and analyze, and they exhibit altruism, thwarting the preying of their orca relatives against seals and other species. Clearly elephants and whales are among the most intelligent species on the planet. Yet both have been decimated by human predation. They have been unable to act in a coordinated manner in response to our wholesale murder of their kind, either to flee and avoid us or to defend themselves from us.
If sapience is something that just evolves gradually and inevitably over time, then we’d see more evidence here on earth of beings other than us that could organize and coordinate their behaviour in response to threats. Instead, there’s a quantum leap in mentation between other smart creatures and us.
A quantum leap in evolution means an evolutionary bottleneck, a time when the species nearly died out. We made it. All the other hominids that ever evolved did not. Again, evolution is random. It’s also historically determined - you are stuck with all the random decisions of your ancestors back to the beginning, and cannot go backward in time and choose a different set of optimizations. Each species in a bottleneck needs to kludge together what solutions it can, using random chance.
We can’t be sure what the bottleneck was for us, but Terrence Deacon speculates that it had to do with our peculiar way of living. All other monkeys and apes either have polygamous reproductive arrangements and live in tribes… or they have pair bonding reproductive arrangements and live as isolated nuclear families. Each reproductive strategy is better suited to a different way of life and a different set of habitats.
We, and only we among primates, pair bond but also live in tribes. Dixon suggests that evolving a sophisticated symbolic language (ie, sapience) was our evolutionary kludge to enable us to change our social arrangements without changing our reproductive strategy, or vice versa. Basically we learned to talk so we could discuss our relationships.
And that’s not something that’s going to happen over and over again – rewind the tape to however many millions of years ago when our ancestors needed to shift their reproductive and social strategy, and evolving a sophisticated language is only one of millions of possible solutions that might have been.
We know there are millions of habitable planets in the galaxy. How many millions, we need better telescopes to be able to say. Lots of those planets will probably have multicellular life. But there is no guarantee that any of those planets is going to randomly produce beings that can talk and think like we can. And there’s no guarantee that even if they do, those beings will be both equipped and inclined to behave in ways that would enable us to learn of their existence.
Hi, I know I'm late to the party!
Date: 2017-10-08 06:40 pm (UTC)Not to mention the enormous time frames we're discussing. Humans have only been around for a tiny blip in Earth's history. It's depressingly possible that the nearest species willing to communicate has already died out or gone somewhere else or anyway stopped transmitting - and that we'll do the same before the next one pops up.