starship-design: Intelligent Aliens?

["L. Parker" <lparker@cacaphony.net>]

Intelligent Aliens?


By Seth Shostak
Senior Astronomer, Project Phoenix
posted: 07:00 am ET
30 May 2002



There may be a lot of life in the universe. If so, it’s a safe bet that most
of it will score lower on the SATs than you.

Just consider the situation on one planet: ours. There are millions of
species on Earth. Millions. Among this protoplasmic plentitude, how many
species are smart enough to be interesting on the telephone or able to help
you with Sunday’s crossword? Well, there’s Homo sapiens, and then there’s…
nobody.

Is this a momentous fact or not? Is the circumstance that we can look around
and find we’re the brainiest boffins on the planet merely a trivial result
of being the first species able to notice? Or is there some reason to think
that intelligence is actually a rare and unlikely evolutionary development,
and Homo sapiens has lucked out?

This is more than just another good question to bandy about after dinner,
between the cigars and the port. It goes right to the heart of our place in
the universe. And it’s also of obvious and critical importance to SETI
researchers. After all, we’re on a fool’s mission deploying our SETI
telescopes if there’s no intelligent life out there.

So how can we judge whether intelligence is a likely evolutionary
development or not? We do the obvious, and look for hints in Earth’s
history. Earth is, after all, the only example we have. Since high IQ
critters appeared here, there’s a tendency to assume that our planet is just
another typical, run-of-the-mill rocky world, and what happened on our
planet might happen on their planet, too. Sooner or later, intelligence will
arise.

But there are flies in this ointment. Sixty-five million years ago, a rock
the size of Brooklyn slammed into the Earth, wiping out three-fourths of all
species, including the dinosaurs. If this hadn’t happened, the rat-like
mammals that eventually evolved into Homo sapiens wouldn’t have inherited
the world. And 245 million years ago, another catastrophe (known in polite
society as the Permian extinction) wrote finis to an even larger percentage
of species. These cosmic accidents were all forks in the long road that
eventually led to us. Maybe on other worlds, the road never gets that far.

On the other hand, there are some common behaviors among animals that seem
to favor intelligence. Social interaction, for example. If you’re a critter
that hangs out with others, then there’s clearly an advantage in being smart
enough to gauge the intentions of the guy sitting next to you (before he
nabs your mate or your meal). And if you’re clever enough to outwit the
other members of your social circle, you’ll probably have enhanced
opportunity to breed (to put it graciously), thus passing on your superior
smarts.

Predator-prey relations are another type of interaction that can ratchet up
intelligence. When a lioness catches a wildebeest, she’s more likely to snag
the dumb one that wasn’t paying attention. Result? The lioness has a meal,
but the average IQ of the wildebeests has been raised. This puts the lions
under increased pressure in running down their next meal, and the dumber
cats will preferentially drop out of the gene pool. Both predator and prey
will be under selective pressure for intelligence.

All of this sounds as if Nature – whether on our planet or some alien
world – will stumble into increased IQ sooner or later. But keep in mind
that many of the dinosaurs were in predator-prey relations (and may have
been somewhat social, too). Why didn’t they get smart? After all, they had
140 million years to do so.

When it comes to the evolution of intelligence, the bottom line is that we
don’t know the bottom line. And indeed, we may never know how likely it is
that intelligence will appear unless and until we find it elsewhere. So we’
ll keep deploying those SETI telescopes.