The Fermi Paradox

Sure. This is a great discussion.

On this particular planet Chordates have the upper hand in the "big brain" category, but I'm not willing to extrapolate that to completely unknown bio-systems. We just don't have enough data to compare yet.

perhaps I wasn't clear. Gould and Mayr were talking about our planet. They merely stated that, with all the rises and falls of life, it was the role of "Pikaia" to carry the initial "backbone" of what would ultimately be our civilization. What I said was that "Backbones" seem to have developed several times in the early Cambrian, totally separate from Pikaia (in the Burgess Shale). Endoskeletons (including the backbones that ultimately surrounded the notochord ) seem to have been a pinnacle structure of all the top predators after the Cambrian.
We ascended to top predator position (as a species) and then rather quickly surpassed that status by naming and claiming "top sentient being" position on the organizational chart of life on earth.

Consequently weve gotta appreciate the total twists of good fortune and dumb luck that our species has benefitted from that, perhaps, may not be similarly enjoyed on some distant rock. In order to appreciate our own good luck weve gotta look back at all the big 5 extinctions AND THE 20 OR SO minor ones that enabled us to move one more step forward (or in the case of the Permian, The lower Pleistocene and the mid Pleistocene events that almost dealt us or our precursors a death blow.) As David Raup said"Nature bats last"

Im not saying it cant happen again or anywhere in space ,I actually disagree with Ernst Mayr and Gould mostly because they were both dead when we started to find all these neat fossils in China that fill in so many gaps. Its just not gonna be so dismissively easy as you and Max seem to claim. It may be another Billion years but it just could happen that a land dwelling , long lived "octopoid" being invents television . I just don't think itll happen underwater when it really doesn't need to. The dryland will be basically, a severely unexploited niche (Im assuming a really big extinction event)

why not extrapolate? Its all a mind game isn't it? Unless they visit us , we have no way of validating anything of which we speak.
The waters fine.

I think thinking out of the box is healthy and can lead to other innovations of ideas and research.

My point was that some conditions are indispensable to higher order technology. Metallurgy is one of them. That one is able to dream up "work-arounds" is not evidence that it would occur. For metallurgy one needs fire. For fire, one needs an atmosphere with sufficient oxygen, but not too much oxygen. (An atmosphere with 40% or better oxygen, and fire is going to be the most devastating of natural disasters.) Our atmosphere seems to be one of the many "sweet spots" we enjoy, with no merit to humanity. Our ancestors could see fires caused by, for example, electrical storms, and could see important attributes of fire. Such as, big hunting cats are afraid of fire. Such as, only certain things burn, and maybe we could control that. How are you gonna get there on a water world? The main point, though, which i was attempting make, is that there could many planets on which sentient, self-aware species could arise, which would never develop technology, because one or more key ingredients in the process (necessarily a trial and error process) are not present, or even just not obvious.

Step back and look at this question a little more carefully. Saying that metallurgy may be possible on a water world (in itself a dubious proposition) begs the big question of why a species would think of it. Human beings did not look out on their world and say, "Damn, we need metallurgy." They saw fires, and saw possible benefits to be derived from using fire. They may well have gone tens of thousands of years, or even hundreds of thousands of years without having yet learned to make fires.

This method of making fire is tedious and labor intensive. It also implies just on the face of it a concerted effort to find a way to make fire. Why would a species on a water world, never having even seen a fire, be looking for ways to make fire, let alone invent metallurgy? Come on . . . you're not thinking.

So, even living above the surface, if the atmosphere doesn't have a lot of oxygen, fire is not automatic. You don't see fire to suggest to you that it could be controlled usefully.

Yes, and some of the speculation here has put the cart before the horse. How would anyone know to attempt the development of metallurgy if they were not already regular users of fire?

By the way, i am operating from an assumption that many, probably most, human technological discoveries in the times before there was a concept of technology were entirely coincidental and fortuitous. So, having mastered fire, humans had leaned that for large fires, in order to control them, one was well-advised to dig a pit, and ring it with stones. At some point, someone built a fire pit, and some of the stones with which it was ringed contained copper ores, and so people learned about smelting copper. They already knew of copper, based on archaeological records, as far back as the dawn of agriculture. Smelting copper, though, gave them more sources, and lead to the development of copper alloys, such as brass and bronze. These can be viewed as happy accidents. Once smelting was known, however, i suspect that the alloying of copper was the result of an experimental process.

So, one wonders what the development of technology would be like on a world with, say, a methane atmosphere.

The annoying thing is that there are answers to these questions, but I will almost certainly ever know them. I will almost certainly die without the tiniest shred of real knowledge about what has happened on other worlds, about what exists out there. Of course, the process of finding out might be dangerous.

There's a great quotation in the "Star Trek: TNG" episode "Q Who?" concerning the nature of deep space exploration:

Capt. Picard: I understand what you've done here, Q. But I think the lesson could have been learned without the loss of 18 members of my crew.

Q: If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid.

Frustrating, Brandon. I feel as you do...that I will almost certainly die without even a hint of real knowledge about life elsewhere.

But...that's life!

I often wonder if scenarios of dangerous and hostile aliens are not a product of the understandable paranoia of the human race. After all, a technological culture which has achieved space travel might necessarily be one which never was, or had overcome violent hostility. The biggest objection, however, to knowing what other technological cultures are like will be that even if we know they're out there, it is unlikely, given interstellar distances, that we'll ever have the opportunity to sit down and chat with them.

I don't see the problem. We invented many things that we had never seen; plastics and microwaves for example.

The point is that the order could be different for intelligent aliens in a different environment... if the intelligence and curiosity and inventiveness are there, I believe the drive for progress will still lead to results.

Obviously stone age technology is possible under water. Tools can be developed. Agriculture is possible and useful as is breeding of animals. I grant that fire would not be possible as early as we found it, but I believe that understanding of electricity may come earlier (because electricity is more observable under water).

Of course there is plenty of chemistry that our underwater aliens could do as they learn to develop new materials and new technologies.

You are right that metal almost certainly wouldn't play the role in their early society that it did in our Bronze Age. That doesn't mean that they couldn't progress through an Calcium Age to reach later more advance technologies leading eventually to plastics, electronics and space flight.

They might come to proselytize. Squid-like, bat-like, thingies in robes, forcing their hideous rituals on the natives. An occupying force, to see we don't violate the sacred rites. Meat grinders for bloody sacrifice. Robots to do the leg work. Starring Mel Gibson and Kevin Costner.

And there is also the possibility that almost NO lifeforms ever get much past the stage of development where we homo sapiens find ourselves...

...a point where our philosophical evolution has not kept pace with our technological evolution.

Perhaps all lifeforms develop the way we did...with the strongest and smartest surviving...in a top-of-the-food-chain dynamic.

Maybe almost every lifeform comes to a point where it is able, technologically, to exterminate itself...at a time long before it has developed psychologically to where it will not do so.

And maybe almost every lifeform does destroy itself before being able to conquer things like interstellar travel.

Maybe there is nothing more advanced than we. Maybe we humans represent the very height of carbon form development.




Yuk...what an ugly, dispiriting thought.

Philosophical evolution?

There is no such thing.

and hows it been working out for us? We don't seem to be doing "undersea metallurgy" and we are the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree.

Thatd be more like it. They are already using dissociation nd deposition of carbonates (unconsciously of course)

Im still asserting that these creatures ould, by necessity, have to venture out onto land to get anywhere with applied technology.
self awareness, abstract thinking, planning ahead. ALL things we just dismiss as minor points of our existence would be a necessity to develop th ability to FASHION tools to change an outcome or assist tsks

The interesting problem (first suggested by Setanta) is whether a technologically advanced civilization could develop on a water planet with no dry land. Of course on such a planet, the developing alien civilization would have access to air. But dry land wouldn't be available (until they were advanced enough to create some).

I suppose that a floating barge on which scientists could perform experiments would be somewhat analogous to our Space Station (except it would be much easier to deploy it).