Thread · 14 tweets · 29 Oct 2018

It would likely justify a longer treatment, but here are some notes. If I might say: you're not being mediocre enough! Mediocrity requires us to think far away from specialness and consider the possibility of being sentient, civilised, or transmitting than seem obvious.

The rarity of civilisation-level intelligence on Earth is, I think, a point that would require greater substantiation than we have data for. To make a parallel, look at how Native American civilisations are perceived: as horse-riding hunter-gatherers.

This despite the facts that: they're still here, it's a short few centuries old, historians care, they are human, they weren't very different from European medieval agrarian civilisation. Yet we have lost much knowledge about that world.

If we can't get something this close to us right and entirely, would we notice a civilisation of giant cephalopods that lasted 20,000 years 80 million years ago? I'm not saying that (or any other speculation) existed, but concluding on rarity seems excessive.

There is a "Wood Wide Web", in fact there's mycelium all over the damn place. It controls plants and guides bacteria. If it were sentient, would we notice? There is very little primeval forest left, if it was sentient before we hacked most of it to pieces, would we have noticed?

Water-based civilisations are unlikely to be driven by fire, the same for non-motile civilisations, and therefore by hydrocarbon consumption. Squishy technology that is sun- and biotech-based would not leave traces.

It's not whether we're lucky but whether the Earth is "lucky". It's hard to establish how exceptional sentient beings are here is without knowing more about whether other sentience existed in Earth history. It's possible that it was (geologically) common but got wiped out a lot.

I could ramble on; it's crazy speculation. But the mediocrity principle, in my humble opinion, demands crazy. We're apes? We go around the Sun? It's hard to imagine how crazy that must have sounded when they were new ideas.

You mention the primordial soup failures, but are autocatalytic sets that hard to get to emerge?

The lack of transmission is the worrying bit. But even that is from a limited angle. Surely there's someone out there speculating that dark matter is a gravitational communication mechanism? Could it be intergalactic signalling? Maybe it's mostly alien porn.

(Okay that's a bit of a stretch!)

But the Universe might select for longer lifespans. A species with much longer life than ours would more likely survive self-inflicted one-planet bottlenecks more easily (from individuals necessarily having to deal with the consequences).

Longer lifespans would also be beneficial for interstellar travel. This may lead to a culture of going places rather than signalling to them. It's also safer — if you don't mind waiting.

Anyway — as I said, I mostly agree. But I tend to be a fair bit more mediocre than you on some of these topics, I think!