| GP didn’t strike me as cynical, only more of a call to broaden our expectations! > Intelligence in this context means the ability to develop the tools necessary to detect other unusual planets. What if instead of attempting to detect planets, they just spam the universe with their space-hardened eggs, and hope that eventually they’ll smack into something habitable? Seems a lot more productive than analyzing incoming UV rays for thousands of years, then spending who knows how long to figure out how to get to the ones we suspect are interesting. We are concerned with disseminating our discoveries and keeping in touch with the folks back home. But a non-hierarchical intelligence (by whatever hand-wavey metric you want to use for “intelligence”) might be more concerned with simply existing in as many places in which it can survive in as possible, whether Mom and Dad know about it or not. This isn’t science fiction: I’d estimate there’s 1e10 spore-producing mushrooms on Earth on any given day. (That’s only a couple steps away from a wild-ass guess, but hear me out.) One mushroom can produce over a billion spores per day, 1e9. That’s 1e19 “eggs” every single day, and that number hasn’t changed significantly for thousands of years. It’s a staggering number. This is science fiction: Imagine mushrooms are aliens who originally came from a planet with a more turbulent atmosphere, one which promotes more ejections of tiny spores into space. Imagine that their spores are drastically more long-lived and more spaceworthy (the Earth ones already do pretty well). This isn’t science fiction: Mushrooms (well, fungi) have a symbiotic relationship with an overwhelming majority of plants. They are crucial to forests; there’s a viable hypothesis that forests only exist because mushrooms “decided” to farm trees. That decision, if the hypothesis is correct, played a huge role in the development of humans and therefore big telescopes. Even if they’re native earthlings (they probably are), could they represent an intelligence whose comprehension of their environment, existential goals, mode of communication, etc. is too far outside of what we are used to in order to recognize them as being intelligent? To bring it back around to what GP wrote, fungi do pay attention to humans, an analogue for “watching” us. They “hear” our footsteps and send hyphae to investigate, because we often track tasty things from our shoes onto their rooftops. If we cannot even speculatively judge a homegrown lifeform’s intelligence, why do we think we’ll stumble across an alien species that makes more sense to us? Those odds seem even less in our favor. |