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?”.
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.
qarbone@lemmy.world 12 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?”.
Alwaysnownevernotme@lemmy.world 35 minutes ago
Um. The desire to explore is pretty innate to all life. Not just humans.
qarbone@lemmy.world 43 seconds ago
How much “exploring” do sedentary lifeforms (plants, mussels, etc) really get up to?
ericwdhs@discuss.online 1 hour 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.