Re: ALIENS would be dumb! Stupid! Primitive!

JTEM wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 

i dont believe anything special happens in the universe. if a 
species reaches star traveling capacity, power laws take over 
determining their distribution.