ALIENS would be dumb! Stupid! Primitive!

If we find an inhabited world, an intelligent species then
chances are they're a ignorant, primitive society.

Every so called "Intelligent" species would have to experience
a primitive stage.

This is inescapable.

No planet is going to spontaneously spawn life only for it to
immediately climb out of the primordial ooze & build super
computers.

No. Not going to happen...

Humans existed for MILLION OF YEARS before any of us left
evidence for the controlled use of fire, let alone metallurgy.

The genus Homo -- "Humans" -- officially begins with Homo habilis,
conventionally dated back about 3 million years... though the
oldest fossil of which is considerably younger.

If you Google it, the usual suspects (Wikie, Google A.I.) are
going to give you ridiculously old dates but the truth is that
we find evidence for the spread of fire back hundreds of
thousands of years, not millions...

The oldest throwing spear is around 400k years old, btw. But
after 300K years or so they disappear from the archaeological
record... don't show up again for quite a while...

The point is, if you didn't know, humans went through a lengthy
primitive stage before ever achieving industrialization, and
even then it took centuries to go from the Industrial Revolution
to space.

So a primitive stage is necessary, all "Intelligent" species
must pass through a primitive stage, but nobody is required to
graduate to an advanced stage.

Nope.

If you graphed all the so called "Intelligent" species in the
universe it would look something like a pyramid -- the greatest
number at the bottom, the most primitive species, tapering off
to the smallest number of highly advanced species, so rare they
actually form the point!

Why?

Because all so called "Intelligent" species would enter a
primitive stage, but not all would leave it.

Humanity was nearly wiped out entirely, rendered extinct, by
a "Super Volcanic Eruption," less than 80k years ago. And as
bad as it was, there were worse. There were bigger, more
catastrophic eruptions in the earth's past.

Asteroids? Like the one that ended the dinosaurs?

Disease.

An unfortunate Gamma Ray Burst could be a planet killer...

Ever hear of "Snowball Earth?" The odds of an intelligent
species surviving one of those lie somewhere between ZERO
and NIL...

And then out of the "Intelligent" species that made it though
a primitive stage without some natural catastrophe wiping them
out, there's always self destruction.

Nuclear war. Biological warfare. Chemical warfare.

Read any of the A.I. doomsday scenarios?  Yeah, that.

And do keep in mind that the whole time they're trying to
survive their industrial period WITHOUT killing themselves,
there's still all the natural threats they had to dea with in
their primitive stage. None of them went away. So, their odds
of becoming extinct have actually GROWN, not retracted...

*We* here on earth are not yet at the point where we set up
a self sustaining, self progressing breeding population on
another world, so preserve our species in the event of a
catastrophe -- natural or man made. WE, right now, are still
in the "More likely to go extinct" stage than the primitives...

AND THEN there's the fact that species die. The vast majority
of species to ever exist on this planet are gone. They're
extinct.

What if an intelligent species evolved pretty close to another
world with an intelligent species?  Real life isn't Star Trek.
Such a scenario would present a major threat to one or both!

The point is that there's LOTS of ways a species may go
extinct, and the older they get THE MORE LIKELY they will fall
to one. Not the less likely, the more likely they won't
survive.

Their odds may improve over time but there would always be a
non-zero chance of them getting snuffed out ever century...
decade... year...

Thus:  The rarest species would be the oldest, the most
technologically advances, while the most numerous species
would be the most primitive -- the more primitive the more
numerous. Yet...

Yet everyone insists that if we find aliens they're going to
be hyper advanced. No, they're likely smashing rocks
together & wishing they could stop freezing their buns off
whenever it gets cold.
































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