If we look on insects, we will see that they were not capable to evolve general intelligence despite the fact that they exist for 400 mln years, they are much more numerous than mammals and they have very high speed of evolution, in which a new species can appear in a few years and each tree can have different species of beetles in jungles.
Insects are locked in evolutionary local minima, a dead end, probably explained by size limitation. The same is true for plants, bacteria and even birds. there are probably many dead ends in evolution which can’t generate general intelligence despite intense evolutionary process. We can’t estimate how many evolutionary dead ends are possible because of observation selection effect: we are not in such dead end.
So, field-animals may have intense evolution, but still are not capable to generate true general intelligence, and being in evolutionary dead end is rather normal.
Another explanation is more sinister: all general intelligence systems tend to self-terminate. Civilizations terminate via x-risks, and AIs via wireheading, meaningless of any goal and halting problems. Only crazy limited intelligence can survive, and thus absurdity of UAP is their nature, not a bug, which needs to be explained.
If we look on insects, we will see that they were not capable to evolve general intelligence despite the fact that they exist for 400 mln years, they are much more numerous than mammals and they have very high speed of evolution, in which a new species can appear in a few years and each tree can have different species of beetles in jungles.
This analogy doesn’t work because humans exist. Life on Earth did evolve intelligence in a rather short time and with an astronomically tiny amount of resources (only that which you can obtain on 1 small rocky planet). UAP would need to be so locked into niches with evolutionary strength many quadrillions times stronger than the difficulty in evolving intelligence on Earth in order for nowhere in the universe to create intelligent UAPs (and given that we are talking about quadrillions upon quadrillions upon quadrillions, do so many many times in many locations) which can then rapidly dominate in the way that humans do now in terms of passing a threshold and now controlling a large fraction of biomass and massively altering almost every trait of the Earth.
It would be completely arbitrary and clearly motivated only by saving the appearances, but yes, you pretty much need a hard fundamental limit to explain why they are so epiphenomenal despite such cosmic resources. There’s no plausible story where they can manipulate the mortal realm enough to screw with pilots but also we observe the universe exactly as it is. (And the easiest hard limit is simply that, like regular aliens, “they don’t exist”. It is hard to change the universe noticeably when you don’t exist.)
In a sense, it similar to the Fermi paradox: there are billions of billions planets, but no civilizations. And one explanation could be similar: as soon as intelligence got to the critical mass and evolve in general intelligence, it kills itself – the same way as the critical mass of uranium always quickly dissipated.
So only crazy beings, especially the ones that are locked into dead end of intelligence’s evolution can survive. And it is consistent with our observations of powerful but absurd beings.
If we look on insects, we will see that they were not capable to evolve general intelligence despite the fact that they exist for 400 mln years, they are much more numerous than mammals and they have very high speed of evolution, in which a new species can appear in a few years and each tree can have different species of beetles in jungles.
Insects are locked in evolutionary local minima, a dead end, probably explained by size limitation. The same is true for plants, bacteria and even birds. there are probably many dead ends in evolution which can’t generate general intelligence despite intense evolutionary process. We can’t estimate how many evolutionary dead ends are possible because of observation selection effect: we are not in such dead end.
So, field-animals may have intense evolution, but still are not capable to generate true general intelligence, and being in evolutionary dead end is rather normal.
Another explanation is more sinister: all general intelligence systems tend to self-terminate. Civilizations terminate via x-risks, and AIs via wireheading, meaningless of any goal and halting problems. Only crazy limited intelligence can survive, and thus absurdity of UAP is their nature, not a bug, which needs to be explained.
This analogy doesn’t work because humans exist. Life on Earth did evolve intelligence in a rather short time and with an astronomically tiny amount of resources (only that which you can obtain on 1 small rocky planet). UAP would need to be so locked into niches with evolutionary strength many quadrillions times stronger than the difficulty in evolving intelligence on Earth in order for nowhere in the universe to create intelligent UAPs (and given that we are talking about quadrillions upon quadrillions upon quadrillions, do so many many times in many locations) which can then rapidly dominate in the way that humans do now in terms of passing a threshold and now controlling a large fraction of biomass and massively altering almost every trait of the Earth.
Unless you posit some fundamental limit on possible intelligence/computational power for field-beings. Would that be too implausible?
It would be completely arbitrary and clearly motivated only by saving the appearances, but yes, you pretty much need a hard fundamental limit to explain why they are so epiphenomenal despite such cosmic resources. There’s no plausible story where they can manipulate the mortal realm enough to screw with pilots but also we observe the universe exactly as it is. (And the easiest hard limit is simply that, like regular aliens, “they don’t exist”. It is hard to change the universe noticeably when you don’t exist.)
In a sense, it similar to the Fermi paradox: there are billions of billions planets, but no civilizations. And one explanation could be similar: as soon as intelligence got to the critical mass and evolve in general intelligence, it kills itself – the same way as the critical mass of uranium always quickly dissipated.
So only crazy beings, especially the ones that are locked into dead end of intelligence’s evolution can survive. And it is consistent with our observations of powerful but absurd beings.