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27, Hahnarama,
Probably because Sagan saw more in Neil than you do?
#27 – Hahnarama,
Uncle Dave is far from the first person to make this comparison.
http://tinyurl.com/2dvp8gp
Personally, I find Neil (yes, I like to amuse myself by thinking that just because I’ve heard him speak live and in person numerous times that I’m on a first name basis with Dr. Tyson, which of course, I’m not.) much more interesting, charismatic, and better at explaining things than Sagan. Making things sound interesting is key to getting people to remember them rather than having them fall asleep while attempting to listen. I rarely listened to Sagan but love to hear Neil speak.
Even when he was “only” the Director of the Planetarium and not yet a TV personality, his intros to science lectures (the former Frontiers in Astronomy and Astrophysics and Distinguished Authors series) were often the best part of the lecture, even when the lecturer was excellent.
Intelligence is proportional to dimensional awareness.
Chimp 3.5D
Man 4D (Ability to calculate doesn’t count.)
Super ET 5D or above
God 11D
When I first heard of string theory and the 11 dimensions that the theory says were extant at the time of the Big Bang I was also reading a book about 1816. 1816 is known as “The Year Without Summer.” The book mentioned a festival of the eleven directions in 1816. I wondered how they knew about 11D.
Turns out the first 8 directions were compass points.Throw in up, down and something I don’t remember and you had eleven.
Almost as disappointing as finding out that the Dogon people probably didn’t know about Sirius b before it was discovered.
To me, the definition of an intelligent species is one which has the ability and will to obtain, store and access increasing amounts of knowledge as well as the ability to continually increase the breadth, scope and quality of the knowledge itself.
Crows, I’ve read, learn when sitting on train tracks when to take off to avoid an oncoming train. In a case where the speed of the trains in an area was significantly increased, for the first day or two a couple of crows were hit by the train. But in less time than it would have taken for every available crow to visually determine for themselves the new higher speed of the trains, the deaths of crows suddenly stopped. It has been speculated that the crows communicated this nformation throughout their community.
But the crows still can’t communicate well enough, or store enough information to say build a computer (analog or otherwise). The crow may make tools, only humans build tools to assist their thinking.
Events beyond the singularity are as hard to imagine for us as opera is to a flatworm:
http://reason.com/archives/2007/05/04/superhuman-imagination
Can you say “nanoo nanoo”?
Good, I thought you could.
Scott, let me know when any of the animals you name can vastly change their environment, invent weapons, perform science, explore the Universe, develop (Uggh) religion, benefit from agriculture, are able to read and write thus storing information for future beings, or learn to communicate meaningfully with humans. Can a beaver comprehend Shakespeare?
Intelligence may be tough to accurately measure, but there’s not an animal alive today that can begin to compete with a human being. As Dr. Tyson points out, even a two year old human is vastly more intelligent than a 15 year old chimp or dolphin.
Like you, I enjoy Dr. Tyson’s lectures and contributions to science. Even if he isn’t as prestigious as Dr. Sagan, he still is a superb theoretician and scientist. I’d like very much to meet him.
# 33 WmDE:
“Turns out the first 8 directions were compass points.Throw in up, down and something I don’t remember and you had eleven.”
From
http://www.sacredpassage.com/resources/11directions.php
“Having made our offering to the eight horizontal directions, turn past the northeast to face the easterly direction once again. It is from this position that you will experience the power of the three final directions: below, above, and below, above, and the infinite within.” (Emphasis added.)
I wonder how many directions are used by the hypothetical super-intelligent aliens?
A related question: are there super-intelligent aliens? Meaning, is intelligence a positive or negative survival factor? Perhaps beings that get smart tend to do themselves in before they achieve interplanetary colonization and/or interstellar travel. (Warfare, pollution, radioactive fallout, oil spills, carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, not even tapping one millionth of the free energy from their sun, etc.) Heck, are we even all that intelligent? I look at the idea of the Dyson Sphere, then I look at the Gulf of Mexico and wonder if it’s even possible to get there from here.
Get Smart–I disagree. What you say is true enough in a vacuum and out of context. In the main: there is a HUGE FILTER for when aliens meet: one or the other or both has done what it takes to develope the ability to travel in space. That is huge in CAPS. Math, science, society, curiosity and so forth.
I say all entities that “care” to go traveling will be like other travelers I have met right here on earth: good people. Not pedophiles. Course there are always individual exceptions and for that I would focus on the word “individual.” Hard for entire world populations to act aberrant as do single individual people.
I trust space travelers to be benign, curious, helpful. Unless they watch too much tv.
#37 – KD Martin,
Scott, let me know when any of the animals you name can vastly change their environment,
beavers.
invent weapons,
Chimps.
perform science,
OK, but keep in mind, the scientific method dates to just a few hundred years. Ancient Greeks did a fair job of it without the method, but even counting them, you’re talking about something we humans have been doing for less than 1% of our own time on this planet.
explore the Universe,
I assume you mean observe the universe rather than explore. We haven’t gotten past our own orbit yet. Our probes have only explored the solar system, certainly we haven’t. And, as Dr. Tyson pointed out a couple of nights ago at SciCafe, the first building taller than the Egyptian pyramids was built in the late 1800s, the Eiffel Tower. So, it is possible to lose our capabilities and not repeat them for thousands of years. Let’s hope that the fact that we haven’t been past LEO in several decades does not point to us not doing it again for a couple of thousand years.
So, as for exploring the universe, we can talk about that when we, in our meat containers, get past our local galaxy. Even then, our galactic supercluster could still be considered local. The universe is big, we’ve explored an infinitesimally small portion of it. Though, even observing it (WMAP, Hubble Deep Field, etc., is impressive). I just wouldn’t overstate it as if we had explored any significant part of our solar system let alone our universe.
develop (Uggh) religion,
That’s not a sign of intelligence. Whose point are you making here?
benefit from agriculture,
beavers again and add leaf cutter ants
are able to read and write thus storing information for future beings,
Good one. Point conceded.
or learn to communicate meaningfully with humans.
Why is this a prereq for intelligence? We can’t communicate with dolphins. Does that mean anything about us? Perhaps, since we’ve tried. Why should other species try?
Can a beaver comprehend Shakespeare?
I think you were better off sticking with science. Why is Shakespeare a sign of anything? It’s fiction, and fiction aimed at entertainment of humans specifically.
Intelligence may be tough to accurately measure, but there’s not an animal alive today that can begin to compete with a human being. As Dr. Tyson points out, even a two year old human is vastly more intelligent than a 15 year old chimp or dolphin.
I’ll agree regarding chimps who have very similar brains to our own, though admittedly less complex. We don’t yet know enough about dolphins to make that comparison. And, the definition of intelligence is highly human biased in the first place.
My point is that intelligence is not a binary switch. It varies in degree. We probably are the smartest species on the planet, which may well prove to be an anti-survival adaptation. But, there are a great many other sentiences with whom we share the planet and whom we should not ignore.
Like you, I enjoy Dr. Tyson’s lectures and contributions to science. Even if he isn’t as prestigious as Dr. Sagan, he still is a superb theoretician and scientist. I’d like very much to meet him.
Perhaps I just don’t know enough about Sagan. In what way was he more prestigious than Tyson?
As for Tyson, his email address is publicly available, though I won’t post it here.
# 39 GetSmart & # 40 bobbo,
bobbo, I think GetSmart is onto something here. An intelligent species with a completely different biological history may be so foreign to us as to be incomprehensible.
We think with words.
Einstein thought in images. If GetSmart is correct about a species that perceives a world through echolocation (bat style or dolphin style), they could be communicating vastly more information than we can through transmission of images.
Think of all of the misunderstandings humans have because we think in words.
Think of the improvement in group communication in humans by the simple addition of a marker board to a meeting.
Now imagine a species that need not draw you a picture but can directly transmit one to your senses as if you are “seeing it right now”. I had forgotten that hypothesis about dolphin communication. Thanks for the reminder GetSmart.
I wonder if we’ll ever be able to know for sure whether they do that.
Regarding engineering, think about the detailed diagrams we draw. Would we need to do so if we could directly transmit images to each other? Would we, instead of writing as we do, find a way to record such transmissions for playback. Imagine our history classes as we “see” history in progress any time we want. Imagine that instead of explaining to someone that Orville and Wilbur just developed flight, that you could transmit your own vivid image of it happening … or better yet, theirs.
And, they could transmit the exact method by which they did it. Someone could then improve upon it and transmit their method. I think the technological revolution would have happened at many times present speed.
Further, when some new technology destroyed a piece of the planet, that image too could be shared. So perhaps, as they leapt past us repeatedly, they would also have a self-regulating way of not destroying the environment. It would be hard to be callous about the blackening of our skies from a coal plant a hundred miles away if instead of reading about it, we could “see” it with our primary sense in exactly the way that those living nearby see it.
Perhaps such a species could not only develop technology but learn not to kill themselves doing it.
Would that we could.
Of course, this is all hypothesizing. The truth about aliens, if there are any, is likely to be far stranger than anything we can imagine.
I think an advanced alien race would want to save Earth from the parasitic apes despoiling it’s biosphere. I wouldn’t blame them. Our race is a continual disappointment no matter how clever some of us are.
BTW, I like Neil but he is no Carl Sagan. Carl was a scientist with the heart of a poet. Go to Netflix and re-watch Cosmos and you will see what I mean. I really miss that guy.
I’ll add as a counter idea this.
Aliens who come across mankind will marvel at the human brain. This is because the evolution of brains is not rare it is practically impossible. As on our planets 500 million years advanced species history tells we are a fluke. Aliens will come and harvest us for our grey matter – a mobile sized intelligent brain on two legs.
So how can intelligence develop without large brains? Interlinked clusters of neurons in large masses of goo. Such intelligence would require large contained bodies.
Don’t you see that our bodies and brains could be envied by big bad blobbys out there!!!
Sorry I gota explain comment about brain evolution.
I mean that what is practically impossible is brain evolution into what we have , rationality. What species needs intelligence as a survival mechanism and progression towards language and rational thinking? One would have to go for intelligent design or species planting.
Apes leaving trees is a what happened, great but why not any other species (non-ape) intelligence-building evolutionary schemes?
My point being that we ARE special, we are rational, rare, and mobile. Vastly intelligent aliens might be, MIGHT NOT.
Scott,
Somehow I don’t equate the beaver’s ability to do one thing – build dams – to vastly changing the environment. Let me know when they have air conditioning, transportation and cities with 8M people.
The scientific method has been around for longer than a half millenium and maybe for 1,500 years. Who knows what we might find in the Library at Alexandria if it hadn’t been destroyed.
Let me know when chimps have built an atomic weapon or even a slingshot. How about a gun? They may be able to understand simple hand gestures, but they’re not advancing the field of mathematics.
>>I just wouldn’t overstate it as if we had explored any significant part of our solar system let alone our universe.
Explore the Universe, yes, we do. You could spend months with the Hubble Deep Field. The Hubble, the Spitzer and other instruments are answering age old questions and providing new mysteries for us to think about. What do you call it? Taking pretty pictures? The Sloan Digital Sky survey has photographed the Universal sphere, so yes, we’re attempting to explore beyond the Solar System. If Odumba hadn’t killed NASA, we might have had a manned mission to Mars within our lifetimes. Now we can barely get to our ISS.
Strange, I haven’t seen a chimp using a telescope or reading a book. Although a couple giggled and struggled their way through suborbital flights, courtesy of NASA. I think some fish and spiders have been taken to Skylab and the ISS. Again, courtesy of NASA. I’d hate to meet the spiders large enough to build a rocket like the Saturn V…
#47 – KD Martin,
In case you hadn’t noticed, I mostly agreed with you. Here are two points you miss.
1) Humans are different in magnitude, not in kind on nearly every point. Again, it’s just not a binary switch. Recognizing who we are and are not is crucial to understanding our own place in the cosmos.
2) Observing != Going. One can photograph a mountain peak from a valley and learn a tremendous amount about it. Is that mountain climbing? No. One can send probes there and learn about the air quality (and quantity) at the summit. Is that mountain climbing? No.
We have observed a great deal about our universe. As I said, this is an impressive accomplishment.
Send me a postcard from somewhere in Andromeda. Then we’ll talk about whether the short trip there is worthy of being called exploration of our universe. Probably, yes, that would be like sending someone a postcard from about Greenwich Village to Wall St and claiming that one was exploring New York State. Technically yes, but one would not have gotten far. We have sent postcards from the apartment next door. We haven’t even made it to the lobby entrance yet.
Step inside the total perspective vortex and have a look at the universe and how far humanity and our hubris have actually gone.
So, perhaps we are impressive by the standards of Earth. But, from the point of view of an alien species that could travel here from truly far away, we might be to them as leaf-cutter ants are to us.
#45 – cgp,
Aliens who come across mankind will marvel
at the human brain.
…
Don’t you see that our bodies and brains could be envied by big bad blobbys out there!!!
Silliest comment yet. An intelligent alien, as hypothesized in the case of one who could invent space travel, would, of necessity, have far greater capabilities of thought than we do.
“big bad blobbys [sic]” would obviously not envy anything unless they could think. Envy is a function of at least some degree of thought, and not one of our best characteristics to point out on this thread if you want to make people believe we’re so intelligent.
Mis scott says
An intelligent alien, as hypothesized in the case of one who could invent space travel, would, of necessity, have far greater capabilities of thought than we do.
No No necessity at all. We can do it with our current brains, its just we choose not to. Our potential to innovate is impressive, its just we are limited by the banker monsters currently destroying our civilisation, just as if large spaceships were blasting with their energy beams all means of production.
#51 – cgp,
No No necesssity [sic] at all. We can do it with our current brains, its just we choose not to. Our potential to innovate is impressive, its just we are limited by the banker monsters currently destroying our civilisation [sic], just as if large spaceships were blasting with their energy beams all means of production.
Oh please. You can’t even spell correctly (or even configure a spell-checker) with your impressive brain.
So, let’s start small. We’ll stay within the Milky Way.
So, tell me what drive mechanism you’d use, given all the money in the world, to get from here to Betelgeuse and back within one human lifetime.
Good luck.
If you don’t know of any technology that is beyond the realm of science fiction and into reality, then it isn’t money keeping us from doing it.
Perhaps our brains are capable of coming up with an answer. However, if they are, we don’t have it yet. And, we must engineer our way around our own self-inflicted extinction in time to do it.
I remain unconvinced.
Miss Scott,
man you go some mucked up idea of what intelligence is, and its expression.
Who gives a shet aboat spelling.
Given horizontal takeoff to orbit (banker et al pref the vertical rip off mode), build massive sunshine collectors kilometres in dimension, far from earth, concentrate sunlight into a tiny space causing a good generator of anti-matter, which is the probable starter technology for large vehicle to star.
Blaa blaa blaa
If only we could gather the sort of collective human effort like what the ancients could, say a manhattan x 10, there would be the experts like the chemical engineers that made 4%U235 possible etc.
However we live in a monster banker world, THEY wont have it, THEY want to kill the ration human.
#53 cgp,
You’re living in a fantasy land. Let me know when you’ve got the faster than light thing figured out, which will be necessary for any seriously long distance travel. I’m sure your Nobel prize is just around the corner.
#53 cgp,
I’m sorry cgp. Let me pretend to take your post seriously for a minute or two.
So, you have a significant amount of antimatter. You have presumably made a container out of antimatter to keep it in.
You have an equal amount of matter in an ordinary matter container. Exactly how are you going to put these two things together in the same ship and combine them in a controlled way?
Good. Now that your extreme intelligence has allowed you to answer the easy part, let’s assume you’ve done it. You have now created a ship capable of accelerating a human to a speed of about … let’s be generous … half the speed of light.
Since our radio and television broadcasts have not yet produced a response, we can assume that any intelligent life that can use such communication and bothers to continue to do so despite presumably more advanced technology, is not within a sphere of (being conservative) 50 light years (time for our signal to travel out and theirs to travel back to us).
So, the trip you want to take is more than 50 light years in distance. At half the speed of light, you should make it there and back in about 200 years. Let me know how that goes when you get back.
Now, my example was Betelgeuse, an arbitrarily picked star sufficiently far away that we can’t yet know whether there is intelligent life around it. Perhaps you’d have preferred a sun more similar to our own. Well, since cosmology and physics interests me more than astronomy (personal preference), I can’t name one. Feel free to pick one of your choosing a sufficient distance away. I’ll stay with Betelgeuse, my original challenge to you, for the time being.
So, for Betelgeuse, your trip will take you 1,200 years each way. I think you’ve failed your assignment. Care to try again?
I’d suggest looking into traversable worm holes. They’re allowed by our current knowledge of the laws of physics. However, please provide details on how you plan to build one as well as what power source you will use to generate the requisite 400,000 times the output of our power generators today. The power will probably be the easy part. I look forward to seeing your engineering diagrams for the worm hole machine or any other faster than light travel means you have up your sleeve.
Remember, there are also environmental and social crises you must solve or at least keep at bay during the time of your engineering of this feat.
Good luck.
#56 – GetSmart,
Excellent point about slower than light travel. We’ll have to go faster. And, we don’t know of any engineering technique to do so at present. Wormholes look to be the best. But, that’s so far off that even thinking of them is purely in the realm of science fiction at this point.
Slower than light won’t get us where we want to go anyway. There is, for example no way to get even just a few tens of light years away. And, if you do, when you come home, it will be many hundreds of years later (at least) due to the time dilation of high speed travel. (Even Planet of the Apes got that point right.)
It’s just not practical for getting out of our solar system. It’s a pain in the butt even for getting to the outer planets Neptune or Pluto. We can’t ignore the fact that the latter has been demoted, at least not on this thread.
“Wormholes look to be the best. ”
What, now who’s fantasizing [sic whatever]. Beware of mathematician [sic you see my problem I just cannot recall words, I have a terrible memory, and too lazy to click the Aa icon] wishful thinking. They are more creative than C. S. Lewis.
#58 – cgp,
Thanks for making my case.
All such beliefs as you have are so far in the future as to be fantasy. And, there’s no guarantee that our current biology can allow us to come up with the science and engineering to actually do it.
So, may I take it that you have now totally given up on making your case?
And, running Firefox is really not so hard. It comes with built-in spell checking. It’s funny for you to be talking about what great brains humans have while demonstrating a total lack of concern for clear and concise expression of yourself or even for the most basic aspects of spelling and punctuation. I can’t imagine that you’d be any better at expressing yourself on an engineering diagram than you are here. And, yes, when debating such subjects, it does show a certain disdain for the exactness of the subjects being discussed and does not further your case to fill a post with multiple spelling and grammatical errors.