Comment by jacquesm
17 years ago
re. the 'stretch' goal:
It all boils down to one question only: how common are the conditions that lead to life? The statistics of that are that we think that if it is possible it will happen. But that doesn't mean that there will be an evolutionary path leading to intelligent life.
Intelligence is not some kind of 'goal' that evolution works towards.
Alien intelligent life could be as alien as Dolphins are, we really can't seem to do much with that other than prove that they are sentient by some arbitrary measure.
I don't agree, but I don't disagree. It may be something evolution works towards, but only in highly-competitive environments?
I think that's one of the things that would be so profound about contacting some intelligent life. It would start giving us empirical data on all of these questions we currently have: Does life necessarily evolve towards intelligence, what similarities all intelligent life has, does all intelligent life continue evolving towards some sort of machine intelligence, how commonplace is intelligent life, does intelligent life in the universe mimic any of our previous social structures, like liege-serf system, are we currently being isolated on purpose, if so why etc.
So let's say we find a bunch of planets with carbon-burning industrial societies, but no FTL travel, and nothing beyond that. Is there some sort of limit in place?
I'm not looking for ET contact to answer any questions, but to begin the asking of a whole lot more interesting questions.