802
Lmao (thelemmy.club)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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[–] 4 points 4 months ago (9 children)

That's ascribing human motivations to non-humans. They could be fundamentally non-curious, only using their relative intelligence to solve actual problems in their environment rather than pushing for "what if?".

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    Um. The desire to explore is pretty innate to all life. Not just humans.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    How much "exploring" do sedentary lifeforms (plants, mussels, etc) really get up to?

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    If you have a species that doesn't feel a drive to explore they would never leave the place they evolved, then they would be at high risk of extinction when their climate changed with plate tectonics

    And perhaps it's the drive to explore that has humans exploring ideas

    Maybe you need to be like us to get into space

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    Most people don't feel the need to kill someone, but if their life depended on it, they'd kill in self-defense.

    You're conflating the "need" with the "ability".

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    I wasn't talking about need or ability, only exposing themselves to extra risk, failing to discover important discoveries because they don't explore ideas. I'm sure I wasn't perfectly clear.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    This argument has never really made sense to me. If you picked a random individual lifeform from anywhere in the universe, then yes, there's a good chance it won't have much in common with humans. If you take the totality of all life in the universe however, we should see a smoother distribution of behaviors. Human-like behaviors would be within that spectrum by definition and should not be entirely unique.

    Let's say of all the intelligent species in the universe, an average of 1% exhibit whatever motivations are needed to go interstellar, and that 1% of those species got a billion year headstart. Well, due to sampling bias, we should still see that 0.01% represented everywhere.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    I was flummoxed for a while because it sounds like this isn't even related to what I was saying. Until it clicked that it wasn't.

    I only said to be wary of anthropomorphizing non-human creatures. Saying all life explores is assigning the human definition of "going out and charting the uncharted" to all of the exploration that any creature that actually explores does. Other interstellar species could go into space for perfectly practical reasons, like their planet is dying or it's over capacity and they don't want to cull their population. Assigning "human wanderlust" as a facet of all (intelligent) life isn't correct.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    Sorry. I may be reading more into the chain than what's actually here. I'm just saying "aliens can't be expected to behave like humans" isn't really a viable explanation to the Fermi Paradox without some big caveats, because given a large enough sample of intelligent alien species, (1) they won't be monolithic, (2) some will exhibit human-like behavior on the premise that humans aren't special, (3) some will have arrived on the scene millions or billions of years before us, and (4) the "somes" from the last two points is enough that galaxy spanning civilizations should already be everywhere even if FTL is forever impossible.

    If intelligent life is rare enough to preclude the "given a large enough sample" (I'm thinking one species per galaxy level rarity), then the solution to the Fermi Paradox is elsewhere.

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