This is how you get Dark Forest strikes

[Philo Sofee]

Could some weird alien influence, seeking to devolve us to the Dark Ages times, have caused modern Republicanism?

That actually seems quite likely. You can't really expect me to believe Donald Trump is an earthling.

[Gunnar]

The fact that life only seems to have evolved on Earth once doesn't necessarily indicate that it's a one-in-many-billions-of-years fluke. It may just be like having a fire only start once, in a forest. Once life evolves, it proliferates to the point where it chokes competition before any rivals emerge.

That was the first thing I thought of when I read that particular argument by Analytics. Given the likely very low probability of any form of life appearing or evolving by chance within any time frame less than multiple millions of years, once some form of self-replicating matter or life appeared, given the incredible power of exponential growth, it and its descendants would almost inevitably have much more than sufficient time to proliferate "to the point where it chokes competition before any rivals emerge" just as you said -- even with a growth rate as slow as a fraction of a percent per year. Thus, I found that particular argument by far the weakest of Analytics' arguments, perhaps even pathetically weak. Other than that, though, I can't deny that his overall argument is very compelling.

[Physics Guy]

It's pretty compelling that we have to say, with Fermi, "Hmm, where is everybody?" That is to say, it's plausible that we might be alone in the universe, or so far from other intelligent life as to be virtually alone. I don't think it's compelling that intelligent life must be extremely sparse in the universe, though. There's still too much we don't know, to say that.

I'm not sure that it's really a bigger step from velociraptors to YouTube influencers than from hydrogen to mollusks.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful: they are found because it was possible to find them.

We humans have never been super-intelligent. We've figured out what we have because honestly it wasn't that hard. Once you get your population up enough, and get the basic needs of enough of your people securely met so that they have time to mess around with things that aren't immediately essential, the technological advances that we have made are bound to come along just by stumbling and bumbling.

Banging rocks makes sparks. Metals and acid make electric current. The derivative of an exponential is an exponential. These things are there to be found in the world, just as sunlight is there for plants to exploit. My point isn't that they were laid out for us by a benign Providence, though perhaps they were, but that technology is an ecological niche, and so intelligence is an evolutionary attractor.

We don't know how strong an attractor it is, so maybe it is somewhat rare, but we didn't develop it just by a fluke.

What I happen to think is more likely is that life and intelligence may actually come in a far bigger range of flavors than we imagine, because the particular forms that we know just happen to be the ones that got there first on our planet. So the universe might be teeming with intelligent life that is incomprehensible to us. Basic math and natural science should be universal common ground, but how we think, and what thinking even means for us all, may range enormously.

Maybe someday we'll have to try to communicate with super-intelligent shades of blue.