Where Are All The Aliens? - Is Technology An Inevitable Consequence Of Intelligence? The Argument Against

The human race is using technology like never before, one of the ways in which we use it, is to look outwards to the stars in search of intelligent life.

We use telescopes to look for unusual activity in both the visible and invisible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. In other words we have safely assumed that if there is another intelligent life form out there somewhere, then we will be able to detect the signals from their tech before we see them.

But is technology inevitable? Is it possible for a species to reach the stage we have, and beyond without the use of computers and all the wonders they bring?

Perhaps there are millions of planets out there in the cosmos, that contain lifeforms far in excess of our own intellect. With one major difference, they don't use technology, therefore there's no way of them ever reaching us.

Over the course of the next two articles I shall argue both the case for and against the inevitability, of the emergence of technology in an advanced species such as our own.

The Argument Against Inevitability - No Spec No Tech

Before we go any further, let's agree on technology being the collective term for any tools used by us that require the use of electricity.

Whilst that may not strictly encompass all what you might call technology, for the purposes of this argument we shall consider it that way. So a battery is technology, the way a mechanical car part, designed by a computer is not.

Obviously when considering this argument it will naturally be anthropocentric, that is we can only look at it from our point of view. Seeing as we do not have another advanced alien civilisation to study.

So with all that being said, let us consider our use of computers and how that came about. As previously agreed, technology is just a name for a bunch of tools. So a computer is a tool.

We are one of a fairly small collection of primates and other animals who use tools. As yet we are the only ones to invent tools that require the use of electricity.

However whilst technology may be aiding our collective intelligence. It isn't the thing that made us smart enough to invent it in the first place.

We were smart way before the invention of the computer. In fact we were pretty clever bunnies before the discovery, and the harnessing thereof, of electricity. We were hunting with tools before we worked out we could start and control fires to our benefit.

Most of the prime movers in the brain were set by the time our language centres began to develop. Our ability for mental abstraction and pattern forming has been forming for millions of years, and they provide the basis for our intelligence.

Given all of that, we still have to admit that the shape of our bodies were naturally selected via a circumstance of environment. This is important to consider because the tools we use are naturally biased towards our body design. They are also only possible to manufacture if you are a bipedal mammal with hands.

For instance, I can imagine dolphins becoming as intelligent as us in a few hundred million years or so. However they will have trouble constructing a Large Hadron Collider in the middle of the atlantic.

Also it is hard to imagine powerful technology without the use of computing power. So it is safe to assume that without the discovery of electricity, and how to harness it, computers would not have been possible.

There are examples of ancient mechanical 'computers', however as far as I'm aware you can't run Windows or OS on any of them.

We can also confirm by observation that the manufacture and use of complex tools requires opposing thumbs and a means of carrying things with something other than your mouth when walking around.

So the question really is; was it inevitable for a primate species to become the most intelligent animal on earth?

I would argue no, our dominance could so easily been averted but for a flapping of a cosmic butterfly's wing. If the asteroid that led to the demise of the most dominant species ever to roam the earth, been shaken loose from its orbit a fraction of a second later. The dinosaurs might still rule the land.

Then where would intelligence develop; in the dinosaurs themselves? It's both easy and lazy to assume that a kind of lizard-person version of ourselves would have evolved. However within the machinations of evolution that scenario isn't really all that plausible.

Changing environment is a prime mover in the ongoing evolutionary battle. Adversity lies at the heart of success for any species.

The dinosaurs' success was so completely tied to their physical attributes, that it's hard to imagine such an evolutionary fork that would produce lizard-people.

If intelligence itself is inevitable, then it would much more likely happen in a sea-dwelling species, and as we've explored above, developing tech underwater is problematic to say the least.

So we can imagine a planet which still had terrifying predatory reptiles roaming the land, and super intelligent dolphin-like creatures living in the sea.

A creature like that would not only have limited opportunities to develop technology, they would also have limited need.

Necessity Is The Mother Of Invention

When we compare our technological evolution with our biological one, we see that technology only needed to go so far.

Once we had learned to cook and store food, build shelter, and hunt with weapons, there really was no exponential evolutionary need to go any further.

While trying to analyse just how far we've come down this technological world. We can see that between the invention of the stone axe and the first plough, not that much was invented.

Then if we go from the time the first coins were minted we see a veritable Cambrian explosion of human innovation.

Now let's jump forward to what is regarded by many as the end of feudalism, the Industrial Revolution. Now we're really starting to pick up the technology pace.

How about the discovery of oil and other fossil fuels? Again we have explosions in population and innovation. If we plot a graph we'll notice that competition brought about by capitalism spurs innovation.

Therefore it is not out of place to ask; would we be so technologically advanced if capitalism never happened?

Let's imagine that the meteor still hit and the dinosaurs made way for the mammals in the same way that they have. However with one minor difference, for some reason we don't develop an economic system like we have today. Instead we carry on living in smallish groups instead of large societies, meaning that cities don't develop in the way they have.

In this scenario perhaps we can imagine a humanoid species with practically the same intelligence that we have now, but without tech.

So in conclusion technology is not inevitable, in fact it may be rare. It may be one of those things that take a very specific set of circumstances to come about. After all, there is nothing obvious about lasers and computers. If there was we would see predictions in holy texts about how we will one day use them, which of course we don't.

It may not be the fact that we're alive that makes us unique, more that we're alive and use technology.

IN MY NEXT ARTICLE I WILL PUT FORWARD THE ARGUMENT FOR THE INEVITABILITY OF TECHNOLOGY. UNTIL THEN I WELCOME YOUR THOUGHTS AND COMMENTS ON THE MATTER. DO YOU BELIEVE TECHNOLOGY WAS ALL PART OF NATURAL PROGRESSION? WAS IT OBVIOUS RIGHT FROM THE BEGINNING? AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!

Cryptogee