{"title":"Children of time: the geological recency of intelligence and its implications for SETI","authors":"Giovanni Mussini","doi":"10.1017/s1473550423000253","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n Of all species on Earth, only one – Homo sapiens – has developed a technological civilization. As a consequence, estimates of the number of similar civilizations beyond Earth often treat the emergence of human-like intelligence or ‘sophonce’ as an evolutionary unicum: a contingent event unlikely to repeat itself even in biospheres harbouring complex brains, tool use, socially transmitted behaviours and high general intelligence. Here, attention is drawn to the unexpected recency and temporal clustering of these evolutionary preconditions to sophonce, which are shown to be confined to the last ≤102 million years. I argue that this pattern can be explained by the exponential biotic diversification dynamics suggested by the fossil record, which translated into a nonlinearly expanding range of cognitive and behavioural outcomes over the course of Earth's history. As a result, the probability of sophonce arising out of a buildup of its enabling preconditions has been escalating throughout the Phanerozoic. The implications for the Silurian hypothesis and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) are discussed. I conclude that the transition from animal-grade multicellularity to sophonce is likely not a rate-limiting step in the evolution of extraterrestrial technological intelligences, and that while H. sapiens is probably the first sophont to evolve on Earth, on macroevolutionary grounds it is unlikely to be the last.","PeriodicalId":13879,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Astrobiology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7000,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"International Journal of Astrobiology","FirstCategoryId":"101","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1473550423000253","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"物理与天体物理","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"ASTRONOMY & ASTROPHYSICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Of all species on Earth, only one – Homo sapiens – has developed a technological civilization. As a consequence, estimates of the number of similar civilizations beyond Earth often treat the emergence of human-like intelligence or ‘sophonce’ as an evolutionary unicum: a contingent event unlikely to repeat itself even in biospheres harbouring complex brains, tool use, socially transmitted behaviours and high general intelligence. Here, attention is drawn to the unexpected recency and temporal clustering of these evolutionary preconditions to sophonce, which are shown to be confined to the last ≤102 million years. I argue that this pattern can be explained by the exponential biotic diversification dynamics suggested by the fossil record, which translated into a nonlinearly expanding range of cognitive and behavioural outcomes over the course of Earth's history. As a result, the probability of sophonce arising out of a buildup of its enabling preconditions has been escalating throughout the Phanerozoic. The implications for the Silurian hypothesis and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) are discussed. I conclude that the transition from animal-grade multicellularity to sophonce is likely not a rate-limiting step in the evolution of extraterrestrial technological intelligences, and that while H. sapiens is probably the first sophont to evolve on Earth, on macroevolutionary grounds it is unlikely to be the last.
期刊介绍:
International Journal of Astrobiology is the peer-reviewed forum for practitioners in this exciting interdisciplinary field. Coverage includes cosmic prebiotic chemistry, planetary evolution, the search for planetary systems and habitable zones, extremophile biology and experimental simulation of extraterrestrial environments, Mars as an abode of life, life detection in our solar system and beyond, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, the history of the science of astrobiology, as well as societal and educational aspects of astrobiology. Occasionally an issue of the journal is devoted to the keynote plenary research papers from an international meeting. A notable feature of the journal is the global distribution of its authors.