The Rival Factor

My reasoning for the statement that 'intelligent aliens are unlikely' is based on a number of points which I am going to discuss. This is all just a theory of course and a product of my own cognition, but bare with me and let me know what you think.

PREHISTORIC LIFE

The Dinosaurs lived for over 135 million years yet never evolved into anything more than mindless beasts. We have fossils but there's no evidence of them living in buildings or utilizing advanced technology or even basic technology for that matter.

135 million years. We have been around for around 200 thousand years, or so they say. Which is a fraction of what the Dinosaurs inhabited the planet for. That's approximately 0.145% of the time in which they served. So nothing sparked their evolution? Well it did! And that was interaction with each other. Though the evolution they under went never overcame our own.

SURVIVAL OF THE BEST SUITED

The dinosaur kingdom as you had probably guessed, evolved in the same way in which our animal kingdom evolves today.

Evolution is fueled by predator/prey interactions. Prey evolves random flaw which increases Its defense and passes the flaw on. Predator evolves flaw which increases its offense and passes it on. This is the basis of evolution, so what the heck did we have to fight against to evolve into this intelligent being?

Well my answer is a race of species that we had to compete against. That's the only answer is it not? The rival would make a leap of advancement and we would have to also or face extinction. Simple as that. That is until the point of advanced intelligence. Could both species have evolved that or did one have the flaw and the other stole it through reproduction? Or was the intelligence factor just a matter of locked potential.

OUTSIDE INFLUENCE

The above I'm more inclined to believe, but some may argue an influence from an outside source. Which I'm not saying is impossible. If God does indeed exist, then God may well have changed us.

A virus may have infected us and mutated our DNA, strange things may happen.

Or Intelligent Aliens, may have done what God did not. But the fact is I believe these to be unlikely, especially the latter. As I've stated before, all the animals that have lived among us to this very day and the dinosaurs that came before us. Not one of them became or have become intelligent beings, simply because they lack a supreme rival. Ok they have predator and prey influence but not the rival they need to challenge them. Perhaps they also lack the underlying ability anyway. Maybe we did have the mind, but we needed to be challenged into it.

RIVALRY AND THE BATTLE OF THE RACES

I believe our evolutionary phase is over now, but only in the major bodily changes sense of the word. Look around, we only differ now from the past in the clothing we wear. Ok on the whole a bit taller maybe, but we consume different things now, somethings we perhaps shouldn't even be.

It's the evolution of the mind that continues. We continue to fight and strive, to Excel in moving the world forward, technologically, and scientifically, etc.

But what pushes us? Well what has pushed us since we can remember? Rivals!

These rivals are different races, It's why countries have gone to war, It's why we fight to be the world power. Why else do countries have borders? If you believe in the moon landings and the Russian and American space race, what do you think it was for? Fun? The space race was about power, about who was smarter, about which race could achieve greatness through the evolutionary mind.

So it is individual races that fuel our current will to achieve the unthinkable. We push each other to further our mind and evolve our understanding of everything.

AN OUTSIDE RIVAL

So what if our Alien friends had the same potential and a rival to push them? It's unlikely, but maybe It's just what we need.

Imagine this new rival from out of space, challenging our right to this world. That will be the day when Humans stand together, for the first time as a collective species, every man an equal in the others eyes. Ready to take on our new rival, and to push the boundries of our minds as we are forced to evolve or die.

You are not taking into account the incomprehensible size of our universe. Probability favors the existence of other intelligent/sentient beings due the countless billions of planetary bodies in our universe.

Who knows....no matter how impossible it seems you could be right.

I know not, therefore aliens...

I understand what you mean. But in some of the ways you talk about Rivals is the way someone would talk about Enemies. Now i do get your point really and just because you have a Rival doesnt mean they have to be your Enemy. Everything has a challenge not just living things. If you work as a team then youll do things much faster. If Enemies became friends and worked together their is no doubt that we would advance much more faster than actually killing eachother

reply to post by DAZ21


I have a few points for you:

Homo sapiens (humans) are an individual species, while dinosaurs are vast amount of species. Dinosaurs evolved as well. The early dinosaurs were different from the ones that lived at the end of the Triassic period, it wasn't like the same species of dinosaur lived 135 million years. Comparing humans to all dinosaurs isn't really feasible. If you want to take just hominids, you can go back 7 million or so years, for all of primates 40 million years, and for mammals around 70 million years. Those are the numbers you should be comparing. The evolution of dinosaurs vs the evolution of mammals. 135 million years vs 70 million years.

Natural selection isn't just about competition, it's about surviving drastic environment changes. Mammals were pretty rare until the impact event wiped out the dinosaurs. Dinosaurs dominated before that, but couldn't adapt to the new earth climate. Mammals could, and they ended up taking over as a result. Evolution doesn't really follow a time table, it just goes with the environment, and if there's no big need to change most organisms will not change much beyond genetic variance. For dinosaurs, their height, tough skin, and razor sharp teeth were the prime characteristics for survival, intellect was not, although there were some dinosaurs thought to be somewhat intelligent. Most were not, however.

For rivals and competition, humans definitely had it. At one point they shared the earth with neanderthals, denosivans and a few other hominids. Humans were able to survive the last ice age while the others were not. My guess is that we were a little smarter and made better use of tools to build shelters for survival, or it may have simply been the location of Africa that helped because it was warmer there and we dominated that area. There's a lot unknown about how we survived and they didn't, but we definitely had rivals.

reply to post by Barcs
As a physiological side-consequence of the decreased jaw bone mutation, humans slowly began to walk upright and thusly the males could no longer directly see the pink, so to speak. Since advertising oestrus was a bio-mechanical waste of energy for the females, and more overt cues had long since been filtered out by millions of years of early primate evolution, males and females were locked in a sort of warfare of intelligence. The male had to deduce and predict whether or not the female was ovulating, and the female had to be clever enough to hold off the advances of incompatible males.

When in doubt, always look to the genitalia, everything else is ancillary.