1. Reverse remittances: Mexico to the U.S.
2. Will intelligent aliens look like us? (By the way, I say no.)
3. The most important law passed this year?
5. This is very dangerous information.
6. Provocative feminist (?) blog.
7. Tips for getting better advice: "Listen to people who hate you."
J.R.R. Tolkien told his son that when he went to confess, he should confess to the priest he disliked the most.
If FeministX is actually a woman I’ll eat my hat. How women are interesting in (1) feminism, (2) cryonics, and (3) human biodiversity (which basically means that differences races have different genes that make them good at different things).
It is a legitimately interesting blog though, male or female.
Justin, I am female. I used to have face pics on my blog where I held a
sign with my name on it, but I took those down. I will try and post a
video file where I am speaking soon if that helps. Thanks for expressing
that my blog is interesting though. Much appreciated
And thanks very much, Tyler. I owe you one.
as far as we know, there in only one form of life on this planet — DNA.
Did it choke off other forms, or do the chemicals only form in a certain ways that are viable for creating life? Was DNA deposited on the planet (panspermia)
I am sure life won’t LOOK like us — humans don’t even look much like each other — but if DNA is the only way of creating life, can we eat extrasolar life? Yummy.
2 – The author poses one question (assume that intelligent life capable of civilization evolves, what are the odds that it looks like us?) and winds up answering a completely different question (what are the odds evolution will progress to intelligent life at all?). I would suggest that the answer to the first question is that the odds are actually fairly decent. The range of body types that could meet the requirements for creating a civilization and still keep its own energy requirements low is rather restricted.
I was rather disappointed that the author didn’t answer the question he originally posed; the other question has quite a few papers written on it already.
It is plausible that intelligent aliens (the kind capable of interplanetary communication at any rate) would physically resemble us, at least to the extend of being visually-oriented sound-oriented land-dwelling flightless bipeds. This is driven by the need to construct things and manipulate the physical environment in large-scale and sophisticated ways.
If you live in water, you might be very intelligent (dolphins, whales), but you can’t really build anything, because your limbs got streamlined away and evolved into swimming fins. And in any case, artificially constructed objects would decay in a saltwater environment, and fire for the purpose of cooking or metallurgy isn’t possible. Cooking is crucial because it enables a species to divert physiological resources away from large jaws and large teeth and elaborate digestive tracts and towards larger brains (and simultaneously supply higher levels of protein and calories to those energetically expensive brains).
Similarly, if you fly, your brain size will be limited by the need to be gravitationally light, and gravity will necessarily be at near-Earth levels because a low-gravity planet (eg, Mars) would not be able to retain enough of an atmosphere or water to sustain advanced life. Perhaps if a planet had a very thick atmosphere you could get away with being a heavy large-brained flying creature, but you’d still have the issue of your limbs having evolved into wings, again not really versatile enough for physical manipulation of objects and building things.
Four legs is a natural, gravitationally-stable design for land-based flightless animals. Insects and spiders can have more (perhaps because it’s useful to have more legs when you walk over surfaces that are bumpy and uneven on small scales, like a forest floor or tree bark), but it’s too expensive for larger animals to develop extra limbs, which don’t really help you run away from predators any faster in flat grasslands. But until you free up some of those limbs by going bipedal and dedicating them to grasping and building objects, you can’t manipulate your physical environment in a truly versatile and endlessly adaptable manner, which is a prerequisite in order to build a civilization.
And finally, to manipulate objects in subtle and precise ways, it is necessary to be able to exactly view and perceive them, so the brains of intelligent aliens would emphasize sight rather than smell (since large brains are energetically expensive, you can’t afford both, so it’s a necessary tradeoff). And you’d have two eyes, for depth perception and binocular vision (and a third eye would be expensive but not give any particular advantage). Echolocation (bats, dolphins) would also work, but we’re positing a ground-dwelling land-based animal and the sunshine energy that is a prerequisite for life already provides a free supply of photons to see with. Not to mention, emitting echolocation pulses could alert a predator to your presence, as opposed to the passive and silent nature of visual sight.
Hearing would also be standard, because sound waves travel in any environment short of a vacuum, and would very likely be the first choice for language and other communication between cooperating social animals. Sign language would be unlikely to be used because it requires line of sight, doesn’t work at night, doesn’t work at larger distances where it’s hard to make out subtle gestures, etc. You’d have two ears in order to be able to discern the direction of a sound source, and three ears wouldn’t give you any advantage over two.
Our hypothetical aliens might also be hairless or furless for the same reasons that we are. We no longer need to have built-in protection against inclement weather and insect bites, because you can solve that problem by making stuff (enclosed indoor housing, animal skins and furs and clothing) rather than spending the resources to carry such protection on our bodies. And as bipeds, we don’t suffer from the screwfly problem: we don’t need to rely on thick hides or fur coats for physical integrity against biting and burrowing bugs; we can just swat and kill them.
So, yes, overall, intelligent aliens capable of interstellar communication would probably resemble us in certain ways. Although relatively intelligent animals like crows and dolphins would probably be widespread, the limitations of their body forms and shapes would prevent them from physically constructing a civilization.
T
Thanks for the pointer to Penelope. What a great find.
5. I call The Flaw of Large Numbers fallacy. Regardless, I had a considerably lower than average salary at the time I paid about average (nominally, not adjusted for inflation) and got a great deal. On both.
3. Most people — including the folks at the NY Times — seem to assume that it’s wise to keep employers away from genetic info, but I haven’t seen anything that demonstrates that to my satisfaction. Every time genetic information prevented one person from getting a job, it would make way for someone else. It’s also possible to envision a future where people with genetic tendencies toward certain ailments were forced by their employers to adopt lifestyle choices that would minimize their risks. That added pressure — first to learn about their genetic risks and then to minimize them — would help people live healthier and help reduce total medical costs. There would, of course, be some folks who became unemployable because of the near certainty of getting some ailment, but it might be wiser for society to solve that one (presumably rare) problem rather than forbidding tests-for-employment outright. I certainly think it’s stupid to make a company hire a 49-year-old CEO who was sure to die of a heart attack at 50. None of this is to say that the law is wrong, it’s just that the issue stirs up too many emotions for us to think about it rationally, which means that we probably won’t reach anything like an optimum solution.
I wonder if Tyler just recently discovered FeministX’ oh-so-very provocative blog, or if he is merely responding to his/her negging him?
” or if he is merely responding to his/her negging him?”
That was clearly a self depricating joke.
“If FeministX is actually a woman I’ll eat my hat.”
Hmm, does Half Sigma have a new project?
I bet Gattaca corporation is probably pretty angry about the new legislation.
The NYT piece on “reverse remittances” illustrate everything that’s wrong with journalism. They find a handful of “cool” stories (precisely because of their unusual nature!), and then they suggest a wider trend may be in place.
My grandma is 92 and a smoker… do I really want to infer anything from that?
Geesh.
Anonymous,
Interesting that you should mention elephants, because they are a 4 legged, large land animal with a separate, non-limb-based, manipulator growing out of the center of their face.
@anonymous re 5: Your argument suffers from the post hoc fallacy, in that you assume that all civilization must be similar to ours, i.e. based on material technology which is not necessarily the case.
Even a pyro-technological civilization such as ours does not necessarily require our basic body plan. A tentacled manipulator can be capable of making tools no less than a biped. At the same time, fire does not have to be a requirement for technological development.
Technological development may be biological or chemical in nature in that a species can evolve a way to fashion other life forms into tools. You argue that other species would evolve defenses to chemical or biological advances. That is analogous to the argument that Earthly animals would have evolved defenses against stone tools. Perhaps they will yet, but evolution of defenses is slower than technological advancement.
Likewise, inter-individual communication may be electromagnetic or pheromonal because there is no reason for non-enhanced communication to be available on a planetary scale for evolution to occur. Voice communication is also very short-range. Non-voice communication can be expanded to planetary scale by means other than electronic, such as for instance by breeding a repeater species.
In short, just because we have trouble imagining a truly alien civilization does not mean that it is either impossible or any less likely than our own.
Comments on this entry are closed.