Yakk

Lets say some basic amino acids got together on the planet Earth, and discovered they could reproduce. What would happen?

They would get smooshed by the highly evolved and efficient life already here. The new 'life' wouldn't stand a chance.

Mankind is ubiquitous. There isn't room on the planet earth for a new intelligent species to evolve while we are here.

It seems reasonable that this pattern would continue: if one intelligence spread over the galaxy, there wouldn't be room for an independant one to grow up. Intelligent life could design new intelligent life on purpose, but probably natural evolution wouldn't be fast enough to pull it off without the older intelligence getting involved actively.

Yes, it might be possible that it could evolve elsewhere. We have no reason to believe it could, while we do know it could appear given 'earth like' conditions (with ourselves as an example).

If, as it happens, the only reasonably metobolically fast and stable life at this stage of the universe occurs on wet, tepid, rock-balls with medium-thick atmospheres, it could be that all the requirements are less common than might be naively expected.

And, we have a pretty large amount of evidence that there hasn't been intelligent life here before us. Thus it took 3.8 billions years for life to get to intelligence. I'm not saying it had a direction, I'm just noting how long it took.

3.8 billion years is a non-trivial fraction of the universe's life span. If it took that long on Earth, possibly Earth was extremely quick at it -- if it took 10 times longer elsewhere, they wouldn't have time to develop intelligence.

If only one intelligent species gets to evolve in a galaxy, then only the fastest one would get to do it.

If it took 500 million years to go from life forming to intelligence, in a 500 billion year old, uniform-along-time, galaxy, believing that we where the first in a race would be less believeable.

But we are orbitting a 3rd generation star, and it took a good portion of the galaxy's total history for us to evolve. Assuming we are at the head of the race is far less unreasonable.

Heard the recent information that the Milky Way periodically turns into a Starburst Galaxy? This means that stars near the core of the Galaxy are not suited to life: you'd be periodically sterilized in waves of supernovas and other disruptive events.

Technological civilizations could be rarer than life or intelligent life by large factors. Maybe Earth got really lucky with plate techtonics, and thus has access to lots of metals, which are quite useful in order to get to a real technological civillization.

I don't, I was just putting forward two possible states.

But, it isn't that hard to expand between stars, at least if you aren't sending warm life. And, as I have noted, we know how to build warm life from scratch.

This implies that technological civilizations either burn out or engulf the universe. Admittedly, Sawyer put forward the position that all technological civilizations turn inward and exist inside a computer-simulated utopia.

I think it might be an aberration. But an aberration of speed.

Robot factories that can build the robots in the factory with minimal supervision exist, I think.

There are plans for robots that do 3-D printing of buildings.

Automation of factories and production is proceeding apace. There are tricky parts, but large (like, factory sized) van neumann machines, that require pre-processed materials, aren't that far fetched. Once the mining, processing and manufacturing is automated, you have a full-scale Van Neumann machine. Then you have to add in automated repair (read: replacement) mechanisms.

A Van Neumann machine isn't hard. A small one is.

Or human cloning?


DNA is just chemicals.

Here is one story along this path:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4104483.stm
I believe cell walls have been made out of non-living material, so the use of an egg wasn't needed. There is a bunch of machinery they stole here, but all I claimed was the DNA.

DNA computing builds DNA, then mixes it in a test tube, in order to solve computational problems.

I think this was the organism I was thinking of: (via google)
SO1, or Synthetic Organism 1.

I thought I read a stronger claim than this somewhere.

Nope, we don't understand it. We can still use it.

We have managed to clone species, without understanding how their DNA works. We don't need to understand how cellular life works, we only need to build a copy of a cell.

Because the Strong made claims that where too strong for the evidence. Possibly the WAP provides nothing more than useful cyclical reasoning: but it points out how that reasoning is useful, and doesn't carry it far beyond what is justified like the SAP does.

Bah, I worded that too finely.

Start with 'intelligent life spreads nearly as quickly as light' and 'intelligent life prevents intelligent life from evolving where it is'.

Then, the fact we can't see intelligent life isn't surprising. Being able to see other life, as an intelligent species, would be extremely unexpected.

__________________
Last edited by JHVH : 10-29-4004 BC at 09:00 PM. Reason: Time for a rest.