Let me tell you a tale of something that happened on this world an unimaginably long time ago
during the pleistocene age.
This was a great period of intermittent glaciation, where the Earth saw a radically different
and varying climate from what we see today that allowed for the advancement and retreat
of massive ice sheets breaking out of the arctic and covering large areas of the surface
of the earth.
The land fauna of this world such as the mammoth plied the landscape adapted for the reality
of this periodically colder world strangely coexisting with the oceanic world where extremely
ancient animals from many ages before such as the coelacanth fish of enormously prehistoric
origin did and still does ply the depths.
After all of the extinction events, and outright battering this world and its life has taken
from many different sources, life was still here and was just at the cusp during the pleistocene
of what was either life on earth’s greatest achievement, or its greatest curse.
This was the age just before humans.
We call our current age after the pleistocene the holocene epoch.
This epoch has led to a kind of war of words.
The word holocene simply hearkens back to ancient Greek like so many of our terms in
science do, and in a nutshell means something along the lines of entirely new.
And it was, it stems from the end of the last ice age as the glaciers retreated about 11,7000
years ago to now.
But it doesn’t acknowledge what happened on this planet during that subsequent time,
leading some to impose the word anthropogene age, or the age of Humanity due our massive
alteration of the conditions of this planet.
I think the second term is misleading in a way because anatomically modern humans existed
well before the holocene, indeed most of our existence as proper homo sapiens occurred
during the pleistocene epoch.
We were on this world when the great Laurentide ice sheet collapsed making way for the new
age.
We are by definition a pleistocene species that persisted into a newer age and yes our
technology has radically given this world a makeover that can’t be ignored, but if
we went away tomorrow, the current geologic age wouldn’t just immediately stop.
Even if it did, we’d be extinct, so there would be no humans around to name it.
If something of us did survive, say a sentient artificial intelligence, perhaps after destroying
us, it might nostalgically continue the epoch naming tradition, if it doesn’t name it
after itself, it might call the next epoch the post-anthropogene following the holocene
if our former presence affected the planet long term enough to define a new age.
At least until another ice age comes, we are still technically in an interglacial period.
But as a development of the pleistocene epoch, homo sapiens came relatively late in it.
And when we do appear, the reality is that there was already someone else here.
The first fires and tools being used on planet earth were not our inventions, but rather
something we inherited.
Think about that, a controlled fire is not a phenomenon of nature, but the harnessing
and use of it takes advantage of nature.
As is the fashioning of a hand ax out of raw stone.
That makes these, by definition, technologies.
If you think about it, all objects of our modern age are fashioned from and are allowed
for by the properties of nature.
Today we mine aluminum from the crust of the earth and refine it, just as our predecessors
hominids once did for suitable material for stone tools.
We mine gold and use it to build computers, whereas it was also used as coinage before
that, and ornaments even before then.
We build cars of steel, again, mined from natural materials.
That is technology.
The unnatural from the natural.
But technology does not originate with homo sapiens.
Here we must give credit to our hominid predecessors, though it’s unclear just which one invented
tool making.
But it was in full swing by the time of Homo Erectus.
Before modern humanity, there was someone on this world making tools and using fire,
and from them came us in more ways than just simple evolution.
Aside from our precursor hominid’s position as ancestor species, it’s very possible
that had species like homo erectus not existed as they did, we’d have never developed at
all.
The first incidence of the control of fire is debated.
There are some claims of evidence of technological fire going further back than a million years,
but more reliably under a million years.
Fire changed everything.
Of course fire has always existed in nature, but through its controlled use, making it
a technology, homo erectus could cook food, run off predators at night, make better tools,
use it for warmth and lighting which ultimately extends the day, and so on.
This may have affected and facilitated human evolution to homo sapiens and our technical
highly intelligent brains.
In short, the fire and the tools made modern humanity, not the other way around.
One major step for which there is evidence is an early homo sapiens site, though they
were not yet entirely modern, these were very early archaic examples of our species, from
about 300,000 years ago where it seems that fire was used to harden and heat treat stone,
making it more suitable for fashioning better tools.
This is yet another early technology that we still use to today, we still heat treat
all sorts of things.
So here’s the question, if our existence depends on the intelligence level and primitive
technology of our progenitor species, that itself could not go to space or make itself
visible to alien civilizations as we do, does that mean we are inherently artificial?
Are we biological AI?
Does all highly technological intelligence in the universe come about in this way?
That’s right, it may be that if you want to interact with a general artificial intelligence
you don’t need it to be an electronic one.
Just look in the mirror, and talk with other people.
And this effect is compounded by another rather spooky thing.
Aside from technologically guided intelligence, your thinking is not the same thing as how
an early modern human 50,000 years ago thought in one key way.
It’s in how you were programmed.
We call it learning and education, but teaching children to read, write, do math, cook, tie
shoelaces, ride bicycles, speak and so on are necessarily learned and taught pieces
of information that lead to a worldview and existence very much different from our ancestors
that lived before the discoveries and inventions existed that led to the convention of those
things being taught.
And sometimes they replaced other things formerly widely taught, comparatively few today know
how to make a stone knife and keep it sharp, fashion a clay pot and heat treat it, mix
up the materials of nature to make paint for the cave wall, operate the ins and outs of
a manual typewriter and so on.
That of course doesn’t mean our ancestors were unintelligent, they just were early in
the game as far as building the cumulative knowledge on which our modern civilization
is built on.
But education is rare in nature outside of humans, though some form of it likely existed
with homo erectus and before, how to keep a fire going or making a tool is knowledge
passed from one individual to another.
Some animals do acquire knowledge from others, and even interspecies, we can train animals
and we learn from them all the time.
But it’s not on our scale as human civilizations.
Dinosaurs were not writing textbooks on physics, and ultimately figuring out over centuries
how to deflect an asteroid.
While it would have been useful for them, they didn’t have the brain for it.
But for homo erectus to have existed, and subsequently lead to homo sapiens, everything
was very situational.
For it to come about, a great many things had to happen.
The right physiology in the right climate in the right area of the world and many other
things had to converge to reach homo erectus.
Had anything gone wrong, and they went extinct, which they are now, and the chain to us would
have been broken.
We know from the history of earth that no other situation in the past 4.5 billion years
has presented itself such that a technological civilization developed.
Because of the Silurian hypothesis, we can’t rule that out, but we see no evidence for
it.
So in all that time, only one highly technological species has appeared.
And it depended on previous primitively technological species.
As a result, this might be a strong candidate solution for the Fermi Paradox, that intelligence
on our level just doesn’t happen often.
It could simply be too hard to get there for most inhabited worlds.
Sure, some make it, intelligence on our level is unlikely to be unique, but they might either
be so far away we can’t ever see them, or they may exist at a different time.
If civilizations are very transient and are only detectable for a short time before they
run out of resources and go extinct or reset to a more primitive existence, then it would
be no wonder that we see the great silence, for we ourselves if it ends up that we can’t
solve our problems as a civilization, go rapidly silent in the grand scheme of things.
But there is an opposite side to this idea.
And it’s the idea that once you hit technological intelligence, it becomes extremely resilient
and almost impossible to eradicate.
If a civilization lasts long enough to begin to colonize space then essentially the things
that can cause their extinction begin to fall off the table.
If you are confined to a single world like earth, asteroids are a threat for a time during
technological development.
This time is passing for us, we’ve already proven we can deflect an asteroid.
But for a multi planet species, only very situationally can full extinction result from
an asteroid impact.
The more planets your species inhabits, the less likely extinction is, essentially on
all counts.
That makes the great silence rather spooky because no one seems to have done this in
the milky way.
That problem is at the heart of the Fermi Paradox because there isn’t a ready answer
that can be proven.
Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.
So perhaps the overarching question to ask is if Earth could have ever produced another
civilization had the natural history of the planet been a bit different.
Yes and no.
The idea of a dinosaur civilization has surfaced before in sci fi, perhaps most notably in
the Star Trek Voyager episode Distant Origin.
For the dinosaurs however this was unlikely, and indeed they may have been moving towards
a partial evolutionary dead end well before the asteroid hit.
The problem is that earth had less oxygen in their day, and that was pivotal for the
development of our very hungry and large, for our size, human brain.
So earth’s evolutionary paths before the rise of the mammals were relatively limited,
and we appear only when we could appear based on the condition of this world, both evolutionarily
and in terms of climate.
This path won’t be the same for all planets in the universe, there may be many biospheres
out there, but few that reach the magic conditions needed for intelligence.
But once that does happen, there could be an explosion of intelligence on a world across
not just one, but multiple species both through natural evolution towards it, but also technology.
Yet we see nothing when we look out into the cosmos.
At least so far, though that changes in a day with the discovery of a strong SETI candidate.
It may simply be that the creation of a somewhat technologically enhanced position of early
tool and fire use for the continued evolution towards intelligence is a prerequisite and
that the great filter may simply be that such a situation doesn’t happen very often and
the natural result an emergence of artificial intelligence of sorts from a progenitor tool
using species isn’t common at all.
But I leave you with this, if it can be said that we are a form of biological artificial
intelligence brought about by the actions of homo erectus, then what does that say to
our current attempts to bring about silicon artificial intelligence?
After all, let’s not forget, homo erectus is extinct.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently casting a suspicious
glance at the dinosaurs.
Maybe they were smarter than we thought, extinct species often go in that direction as we learn
more about them, and maybe instead of deflecting the asteroid they just considered the whole
thing highly unlikely and just didn’t bother to try.
The hubris of the dinosaurs knows no limits, won’t even get into the grim view I have
of the related pterodactyls and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online
book retailer and subscribe to my channels for regular, in-depth explorations into the
interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.