Good Night thought.
Aug. 21st, 2004 02:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swestrupI was just heading off to bed when I was struck by a thought I hadn't had before, at least, not in this form.
We all know that it took the cavemen a LONG time to get to the point of having spears, animal hides and whatnot. The archaeological record is not terribly well fleshed out for our earliest ancestors, but it looks like it was somewhere around a million years ago that Homo Sapiens Sapiens first appeared. Our first records of tool use are something like 50,000 years old. (I'm sure all the actual details on this are different now than the last time I studied this. I'm gonna have to read me some more books -- but I digress).
The point is that we know that creatures with brains essentially identical to ours spent upwards of 500,000 years before it occured to them to bang the rocks together.
The conclusion that most folks come to is "Boy, were we dumb!"
Maybe the right conclusion though, is that those first few steps are far, far, harder than we've ever imagined them to be.
Try this excercise, as its what caused me to have the idea for this post:
Imagine an intelligent species that has evolved in a very different environment than we did. Maybe they're aquatic. Maybe they live submerged in mud. Maybe they have only one manipulatory limb, and its in the middle of their backs, because it only evolved to help them scratch their butts. Imagine that the gravity, weather, atmosphere, biochemistry, are all radically different from here. Maybe the air is opaque. Maybe the atmospheric pressure is crushing and the gravity is intense, and manganese is the main element from which body supports are constructed.
Now, ask yourself, what's the first step on the road to interstellar flight? What could they do, given a brain as good as ours, and that environment? Stones might be rare and crumbly, fires may not stay lit. Make sure that NONE of the solutions you already know from history are viable. Now, invent a new one, and the next, and the next. Figure out how they get to where we are.
I've been working on this excercise for a week now, and all I can say is, the man that first figured out that you could use one rock to sharpen another was a FRICKEN GENIUS!
We all know that it took the cavemen a LONG time to get to the point of having spears, animal hides and whatnot. The archaeological record is not terribly well fleshed out for our earliest ancestors, but it looks like it was somewhere around a million years ago that Homo Sapiens Sapiens first appeared. Our first records of tool use are something like 50,000 years old. (I'm sure all the actual details on this are different now than the last time I studied this. I'm gonna have to read me some more books -- but I digress).
The point is that we know that creatures with brains essentially identical to ours spent upwards of 500,000 years before it occured to them to bang the rocks together.
The conclusion that most folks come to is "Boy, were we dumb!"
Maybe the right conclusion though, is that those first few steps are far, far, harder than we've ever imagined them to be.
Try this excercise, as its what caused me to have the idea for this post:
Imagine an intelligent species that has evolved in a very different environment than we did. Maybe they're aquatic. Maybe they live submerged in mud. Maybe they have only one manipulatory limb, and its in the middle of their backs, because it only evolved to help them scratch their butts. Imagine that the gravity, weather, atmosphere, biochemistry, are all radically different from here. Maybe the air is opaque. Maybe the atmospheric pressure is crushing and the gravity is intense, and manganese is the main element from which body supports are constructed.
Now, ask yourself, what's the first step on the road to interstellar flight? What could they do, given a brain as good as ours, and that environment? Stones might be rare and crumbly, fires may not stay lit. Make sure that NONE of the solutions you already know from history are viable. Now, invent a new one, and the next, and the next. Figure out how they get to where we are.
I've been working on this excercise for a week now, and all I can say is, the man that first figured out that you could use one rock to sharpen another was a FRICKEN GENIUS!
