Comment on Lmao

• Saledovil@sh.itjust.works ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Some humans want to travel even when they’re perfectly happy.

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  • qarbone@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    That’s ascribing human motivations to non-humans. They could be fundamentally non-curious, only using their relative intelligence to solve actual problems in their environment rather than pushing for “what if?”.

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    • Alwaysnownevernotme@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Um. The desire to explore is pretty innate to all life. Not just humans.

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      • qarbone@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        How much “exploring” do sedentary lifeforms (plants, mussels, etc) really get up to?

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    • ericwdhs@discuss.online ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      This argument has never really made sense to me. If you picked a random individual lifeform from anywhere in the universe, then yes, there’s a good chance it won’t have much in common with humans. If you take the totality of all life in the universe however, we should see a smoother distribution of behaviors. Human-like behaviors would be within that spectrum by definition and should not be entirely unique.

      Let’s say of all the intelligent species in the universe, an average of 1% exhibit whatever motivations are needed to go interstellar, and that 1% of those species got a billion year headstart. Well, due to sampling bias, we should still see that 0.01% represented everywhere.

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      • qarbone@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I was flummoxed for a while because it sounds like this isn’t even related to what I was saying. Until it clicked that it wasn’t.

        I only said to be wary of anthropomorphizing non-human creatures. Saying all life explores is assigning the human definition of “going out and charting the uncharted” to all of the exploration that any creature that actually explores does. Other interstellar species could go into space for perfectly practical reasons, like their planet is dying or it’s over capacity and they don’t want to cull their population. Assigning “human wanderlust” as a facet of all (intelligent) life isn’t correct.

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