Eliezer, your observers would hopefully have noticed hundreds of millions of years of increasing world-modeling cognitive capability, eventually leading to a species with sufficient capacity to form a substrate for memetic progress, followed by a hundred thousand years and a hundred billion individual lives leading up to now.
Looking at a trilobyte, the conclusion would not be that such future development is “impossible”, but perhaps “unlikely to occur while I’m eating lunch today”.
Eliezer, your observers would hopefully have noticed hundreds of millions of years of increasing world-modeling cognitive capability, eventually leading to a species with sufficient capacity to form a substrate for memetic progress, followed by a hundred thousand years and a hundred billion individual lives leading up to now.
Looking at a trilobyte, the conclusion would not be that such future development is “impossible”, but perhaps “unlikely to occur while I’m eating lunch today”.