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PoachedSausage | 5 years ago

Maybe there has been some sort of accident of scale, like the intergalactic fleet in Hitch Hiker Guide to the Galaxy that arrives to destroy Earth but is eaten by a dog.

There could be a banging ET party going at the Planck scale and we would never know, they might as well be on the other side of the universe.

discuss

order

godelski|5 years ago

The problem with this is that mechanics is not scale invariant. This puts bounds on creatures. Unless there's some crazy different way to compute I wouldn't expect a being to be able to have strong cognitive functions and be the size of a fly. They would also have a difficult time building advanced machinery to get to galactic travel scales. Similarly I wouldn't expect a creature the size of a Brontosaurus to become space faring. Because of their sizes they would have to consume significantly more resources to build simple things. A two story house probably couldn't be created out of wood or other basic biological materials making it difficult to transition into even the stone age. They also require higher food because energy requirements aren't linear. But think how much it costs to send a pound to space. Their first to space would be significantly more expensive.

This doesn't mean these things are impossible because maybe there are ways around them, but it certainty shifts the probabilities by quite a bit. Given our current understanding of biology and mechanics it makes it much more probable for creatures to be within the ballpark of our size (let's say crow to elephant?).

PaulDavisThe1st|5 years ago

I think this is a mistaken way of thinking in general, because you're omitting time. Your assuming that intelligent/thinking/conscious creatures would necessarily function on timelines that make sense to us. If that were true, then what you're saying makes sense - there are real bounds on how fast you can move chemical energy from A to B, for example.

But I see nothing preventing intelligent life from operating on massively longer timescales. This requires, of course, that you believe that intelligence (and maybe consciousness too) is substrate and timescale independent, which may or may not be a big ask depending on where you stand on these issues.