|
| Personal background |
|---|
| Molecular biologist in the pharmaceutical industry. Age 54. Still spend a lot of time looking into space and wondering. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
|---|
I am confident there are living systems throughout our universe. No doubt they occur in great profusion on many billions of planets. But what are the selection processes for intelligence to evolve? If intelligence requires the origination, collaboration and fine tuning of many genes (or the local equivalent) then maybe the chance of its evolution over the lifetime of a solar system is very low. Intelligence is a path not an endpoint. If there is intelligence elsewhere, how close to us on the path does it have to be for us to recognise it (over the vast distances between us) ? Alternatively, maybe the evolution of intelligence is frequent wherever life occurs because living systems invariably diverge (no replication process is 100% accurate), the progeny compete and competition has intelligence as a very probable answer for winning.
Looking at our planet, it took 4.5 thousand million years for H.sapiens to appear and there were many non-intelligent species who were successful winners for long spans of time prior to our arrival so clearly the evolution of intelligence isn’t inevitable. It seems to me that an intelligence more than 1000 years of evolutionary distance away from ours would not be recognized by us either because they would be broadcasting
by a technology unfamiliar to our detection system or simply because they chose to remain hidden to us, considering in the same way we might that revealing their presence to us would disrupt our cultural development unacceptably (with the possible exception of those intelligences which choose to spread mental viruses such as religions or "isms" or bad poetry). So it might be that if intelligence only evolves once in the lifetime of a suitable planet (9000million years?), we only have a (2000/9000million)X 100% chance of it being close enough to us on the path of intelligence to detect it.
Well, that's why I've been running WUs. I want to know if there’s anything in our backyard so I can put a few more factors into the Drake equation. |
| Your feedback on this profile |
|---|
| Recommend this profile for User of the Day: |
I like this profile |
| Alert administrators to an offensive profile: |
I do not like this profile |
|
| Account data |
View |
| Team |
None |
|
