State of the Game

perhaps op wants to join Greenpeace, yes you know the ones that go around harpoon Ships captains and say that fine to Save the world. Stop tree forestry has it help's the ozone. when you find most of the problem Started in the ancient history (1200's).
 
Why would dolphins want to evolve? They probably watched us and said sod that for a game of soldiers, we are quite happy frolicking in the sea and don't have to go to work.
Whoever heard of a dolphinmade disaster?
As Douglas Adams said “Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”
 
i have given up - we aren't able to stop growth rates because we depend on them and no one wants to change this. We are so focused on maintaining our way of life, which isn't sustainable and that means in the end that we aren't sustainable either. There is no chance, we are too selfish and too stupid to get this right. Even bacteria have better strategies to deal with situations, where they are near to exhausting all resources - for them that is a permanent problem and they have ways to deal with it - like dissolving themselves in vast amounts to ease the situation - this would be massively reducing the amount of people if we would do it like that - then the remaining bacteria grow much more slowly towards the saturation border, but stop their growth just below reaching it and get into a sustainable state there - a whole lot go dormant, others keep up the matrix of the biofilm, which protects them - but mankind never really had to face the saturation border and we are like lemmings happily running towards it just to jump into the abyss then.
Agree wholehearedly! Humanity is like the apocryphal ostrich with its head in the sand where population sustainability is concerned.

To the latter - dolphins are rather intelligent conscious creatures as well, but they won't achieve space flight or colonize another planet. They won't send out signals which could be picked up in other star systems. It is intelligent conscious life, yes, but not sophisticated enough to be a spacefaring species.
Depends on timescale - if all the primates vanished from the earth, over a span of humdreds of millions of years, it's not too much of a leap to think another already intelligent species could potentially develop intelligence to a level of or above humanity
 
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Agree wholehearedly! Humanity is like the apocryphal ostrich with its head in the sand where population sustainability is concerned.


Depends on timescale - if all the primates vanished from the earth, over a span of humdreds of millions of years, it's not too much of a leap to think another already intelligent species could potentially develop intelligence to a level of or above humanity
There has to be a benefit it in or it won't evolve - i see no benefit in them getting more intelligent than they are - their life isn't endangered and there is no benefit in having an even larger brain.
 
There has to be a benefit it in or it won't evolve - i see no benefit in them getting more intelligent than they are - their life isn't endangered and there is no benefit in having an even larger brain.
Agree, but rvolutionary pressure tends to come at pinch points for species, and it would be very likely that some form of partial extinction event could provide enough of a pinch point to drive an evolutionary pressure to increased intelligence, much as it probably did for primates
 
There has to be a benefit it in or it won't evolve - i see no benefit in them getting more intelligent than they are - their life isn't endangered and there is no benefit in having an even larger brain.
Considering your post about DOOMED humanity, I don't see raising intelligence and cognitive potential as unconditionally beneficial in evolutionary sense.

We skyrocketed in brain development, and it only brought doom to us, if all those apocalyptic scenarios will turn out true.
If we just stayed as "dumb" as other primates, we would survive longer as a specie.
 
Agree, but rvolutionary pressure tends to come at pinch points for species, and it would be very likely that some form of partial extinction event could provide enough of a pinch point to drive an evolutionary pressure to increased intelligence, much as it probably did for primates
what really led to it imo is learning to control fire and cooking food - cooked food is providing the required energy to support a larger brain, without that it might not have evolved like that, because the trade-off between the already somewhat usefulness of the brain and it's increasing costs to maintain it, might just have led to it not evolving further. it is vastly underestimated how important the control of fire and actually cooking food has had on this evolutionary step.
 
Considering your post about DOOMED humanity, I don't see raising intelligence and cognitive potential as unconditionally beneficial in evolutionary sense.

We skyrocketed in brain development, and it only brought doom to us, if all those apocalyptic scenarios will turn out true.
If we just stayed as "dumb" as other primates, we would survive longer as a specie.
it is not intelligence which is the problem, but individualism, which led to selfishness and lowered cooperative behavior. If we would be a drone-like entity serving a hive, we would have had a much better chance. it wouldn't be fun, but that is one of the most successful ways of life in regards to survival. if there are alien races out there, which would be spacefaring, I would rather expect them to be like the borg (without a queen though). because that is a concept which actually works out well enough in nature on earth.

it is quite interesting to see in a just slightly related context how China is doing by using a concept which is kind of drone-like - their totalitarian way and control of their people creates something similar to a hive - and that makes them rather successful in the end. We will have to see though, if they can maintain the control or if individualism will win.
 
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it is not intelligence which is the problem, but individualism, which led to selfishness and lowered cooperative behavior. If we would be a drone-like entity serving a hive, we would have had a much better chance. it wouldn't be fun, but that is one of the most successful ways of life in regards to survival. if there are alien races out there, which would be spacefaring, I would rather expect them to be like the borg (without a queen though). because that is a concept which actually works out well enough in nature on earth.
It's something even worse then individualism or selfishness.

Even as individuals humans tend to make a lot of choices that are obviously bad and harmful for them, even if they are smart enough to know that long before the inevitable consequences will start the "punishment" phase.
It's like we have lost balance and "sense of direction", different parts/layers of our brains are living in different "worlds" - some have progressed, others are still way beyond and work in loop that is ignoring long-term consequences or "the bigger picture" and they control us using the reward system based on obsolete code, not updated for ages.
 
It's something even worse then individualism or selfishness.

Even as individuals humans tend to make a lot of choices that are obviously bad and harmful for them, even if they are smart enough to know that long before the inevitable consequences will start the "punishment" phase.
It's like we have lost balance and "sense of direction", different parts/layers of our brains are living in different "worlds" - some have progressed, others are still way beyond and work in loop that is ignoring long-term consequences or "the bigger picture" and they control us using the reward system based on obsolete code, not updated for ages.
well put - this is because we have a different layer on top of the biological one, which enables us to evolve at a different speed as a species, by communication and sharing information - and that is not in balance with the rather slow biological evolution. Then there is our social behavior, which lead to us supporting that what would be in nature unworthy - that is human to do that, but it is counterproductive to biological evolution. individualism like we have it, is kind of a new thing in nature and in it's test phase so to speak. So far it doesn't turn out that well, even it has it's benefits as well, because it leads to a few people "thinking out of the box" and there is a stronger tendency to do things differently to how it was done for ages. This leads to more speedy inventions - which can be beneficial but as well be disastrous. It is a new way of enhancing biological evolution and it might or might not turn out successful in the end - so far for humankind it had it's benefits for some time, but now it looks like being of more harm than good.
 
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