I’d be curious to know your probability that non-humans would re-establish civilization if humans went extinct.
Uninformed speculation follows.
On the face of things it seems pretty likely. ”...if the dinosaurs hadn’t been killed by an asteroid, plausibly they would still rule the Earth, without any advanced civilization.” I got the impression that the dinosaurs experienced several mass extinctions, and mammals displaced them when there was a mass extinction associated with climate change? Periodic mass extinctions are evidence against Earth getting “clogged” this way.
I don’t feel like I have a good sense of likely causes of human extinction. Destruction of human civilization seems likely; most civilizations that have existed have eventually ended. But when I look at Wikipedia’s page on human extinction, scenarios where every last human dies while other life persists on Earth don’t seem super numerous. For example, it seems tricky to engineer a virus with a 100% kill rate that is also infectious enough to infect all 7 billion of us. (Do we have recorded instances of entire species being wiped out due to illness this way?) And if nanobots or some physics experiment eats the planet, that will destroy all the other life too. The most likely scenario seems like destruction of current human civilization alongside destruction of viable ecological niches for technologically unsophisticated human bands—runaway global warming or nuclearwinter?
If that’s the scenario that comes about, I would guess that lots of animals will survive, analogous to extinction events that killed off dinosaurs. I don’t think that a big fraction of the great filter is between development of animals and civilization, although it seems plausible that there is some filter here. A naive way to estimate: divide the number of times civilization has arisen (once) by the number of times Earth has been “wiped” by mass extinctions. Then figure out how frequently mass extinctions occur and how many more “wipes” we can expect before Earth is uninhabitable.
On balance it’s plausible our hypothetical replacements would be less compassionate, because compassion is something humans value a lot, while a random other species probably values something else more. The reason I’m asking this question in the first place is because humans are outliers in their degree of compassion.
Why do you believe that humans are outliers in their degree of compassion relative to other social species?
Almost by definition, a species that creates a civilization is capable of large-scale cooperation. But this large-scale cooperation could look much different than human cooperation looks like. (I’m guessing it would be relatively easy for a eusocial species to control its reproduction, so if it achieved sufficient intelligence to understand the basics of breeding, it might be able to “bootstrap” itself to higher levels of intelligence from there.)
(I can imagine exotic scenarios where large-scale cooperation is less necessary for starfaring: consider a species that lived much longer than humans, meaning individuals had longer lifetimes over which to accumulate knowledge, which makes knowledge-sharing through culture less necessary. But I believe that species tend to be longer-lived in highly stable environments, and a highly stable environment is less likely to stumble across a configuration that creates an ecological niche for a highly intelligent tool-using species.)
It occurs to me that we might want to focus on how cohesively a species cooperates over how compassionate it seems to be. If you look at human actions like factory farming, these seem to be less a product of some human prediliction for cruelty, and more a result of incentive structures. In a post-scarcity society, we’d expect this to be less of a consideration. But a post-scarcity society requires more than just technology. Incentive structures also seem less contingent on biological factors and more contingent on societal factors.
Interesting about dinosaurs. :) I added this to my piece as footnote 4 (see there for the hyperlinks):
John Maxwell disputes this claim. My reasoning is that dinosaurs lasted for at least 135 million years but only went extinct 66 mya. It’s easy to imagine that dinosaurs might have lasted, say, twice as long as they did, in which case they would still rule the Earth today.
I agree that, among ways all humans might go extinct that leave around other animals, runaway climate change and nuclear war are contenders. However, I’m skeptical that there would be many vertebrates left in these scenarios. I would think humans would try to eat every mammal, bird, and fish they could find. I guess humans couldn’t kill every last mouse or minnow, but in these scenarios, plant growth would also be compromised (or else humans would be eating plants), so it’s not clear how well these small animals could survive.
A naive way to estimate: divide the number of times civilization has arisen (once) by the number of times Earth has been “wiped” by mass extinctions.
Interesting. :) But this is (perhaps very strongly) biased by the selection effect that we find ourselves here and not on the (many?) other planets where intelligent life never got to the human level.
Why do you believe that humans are outliers in their degree of compassion relative to other social species?
This was a statement about selection bias (namely, that humans care more about what they care about than other civilizations do) rather than an empirical generalization from biology. I agree humans seem to be somewhere in the middle in terms of peacefulness relative to primates. Unlike cetaceans, wolves, etc., we’re not obligate carnivores. We’re also more compassionate to outgroup members than ants are, although it’s hard to say what ant morality would look like if ants were as intelligent as mammals.
I still don’t see why we should expect these future extinction events to wipe out all vertebrates when vertebrates made it through dinosaur extinction events. Most plants aren’t human-edible, and I’m skeptical humans would be systematic enough in foraging through remote wilderness to kill off more than half the wild vertebrates on the planet.
Interesting. :) But this is (perhaps very strongly) biased by the selection effect that we find ourselves here and not on the (many?) other planets where intelligent life never got to the human level.
Yep.
humans seem to be somewhere in the middle in terms of peacefulness relative to primates
How certain are you about this? Some quick Googling:
“The northern muriqui has been argued to be important to understanding human evolution, since it is one of the few primates that has tolerant, nonhierarchial relationships among and between males and females, a feature shared with hunter-gatherer humans, but which contrasts with the ranked relationships of most other primates.” (source)
“Male primates, in general, take very little interest in helping to rear offspring… Pair bonding of any sort is rare among primates, though gibbons seem to be lifelong monogamists, and some new world monkey groups, such as marmosets, have only one reproductively active pair in any group.” (source)
“This was also studied in rhesus macaques and pigtail macaques. They found that infants, when separated from their mothers, went though all these stages of separations- protest, despair etc. The saw the same thing with rhesus and pigtails, but in bonnet macaques, the infants don’t go through all this psychological trauma. It’s pretty clear why if you look at their social organization- there are a lot of allomothers in bonnet macaques and babies are often left by their moms in the wild and someone else will take care of it and bring it back to her later. So it’s important to pick more than one species and to compare across species when you’re doing this comparative approach for behavioral models… We also are different because we (both sexes) cooperate with non-kin pretty often.” (source—first bit is interesting because I don’t think humans really alloparent, which seems like an altruistic behavior?)
Random related thought: Somewhere I read that humans “self-domesticated” over the course of our species through e.g. capital punishment for murderers. Does that mean that we are “just cooperative enough” to be civilized? (In other words, did this “self-domestication” process occur until the point at which large scale civilization became possible, and that’s where we are right now?)
Some of this stuff might be related to the evolution of intelligence though, e.g. human babies are born prematurely relative to other species because our large heads would not fit through the birth canal otherwise. So perhaps a primate species would need to engage in pair bonding in order to make this sort of ‘premature’ birth (and thus the evolution of high intelligence) possible. This factor seems relatively contingent on primate anatomy. So maybe a non-primate-descended intelligent species would be less likely to experience pair bonding (I think it’s rare in the animal kingdom) and thus be less benevolent. (BTW, I think species that pair bond are a strict (and small) subset of species that are considered K-selected, but I could be wrong. It seems pretty likely that intelligent aliens would be K-selected in some form.)
Thanks. :) I discuss that a bit here. I’d be curious to know your probability that non-humans would re-establish civilization if humans went extinct.
Uninformed speculation follows.
On the face of things it seems pretty likely. ”...if the dinosaurs hadn’t been killed by an asteroid, plausibly they would still rule the Earth, without any advanced civilization.” I got the impression that the dinosaurs experienced several mass extinctions, and mammals displaced them when there was a mass extinction associated with climate change? Periodic mass extinctions are evidence against Earth getting “clogged” this way.
I don’t feel like I have a good sense of likely causes of human extinction. Destruction of human civilization seems likely; most civilizations that have existed have eventually ended. But when I look at Wikipedia’s page on human extinction, scenarios where every last human dies while other life persists on Earth don’t seem super numerous. For example, it seems tricky to engineer a virus with a 100% kill rate that is also infectious enough to infect all 7 billion of us. (Do we have recorded instances of entire species being wiped out due to illness this way?) And if nanobots or some physics experiment eats the planet, that will destroy all the other life too. The most likely scenario seems like destruction of current human civilization alongside destruction of viable ecological niches for technologically unsophisticated human bands—runaway global warming or nuclear winter?
If that’s the scenario that comes about, I would guess that lots of animals will survive, analogous to extinction events that killed off dinosaurs. I don’t think that a big fraction of the great filter is between development of animals and civilization, although it seems plausible that there is some filter here. A naive way to estimate: divide the number of times civilization has arisen (once) by the number of times Earth has been “wiped” by mass extinctions. Then figure out how frequently mass extinctions occur and how many more “wipes” we can expect before Earth is uninhabitable.
Why do you believe that humans are outliers in their degree of compassion relative to other social species?
Almost by definition, a species that creates a civilization is capable of large-scale cooperation. But this large-scale cooperation could look much different than human cooperation looks like. (I’m guessing it would be relatively easy for a eusocial species to control its reproduction, so if it achieved sufficient intelligence to understand the basics of breeding, it might be able to “bootstrap” itself to higher levels of intelligence from there.)
(I can imagine exotic scenarios where large-scale cooperation is less necessary for starfaring: consider a species that lived much longer than humans, meaning individuals had longer lifetimes over which to accumulate knowledge, which makes knowledge-sharing through culture less necessary. But I believe that species tend to be longer-lived in highly stable environments, and a highly stable environment is less likely to stumble across a configuration that creates an ecological niche for a highly intelligent tool-using species.)
It occurs to me that we might want to focus on how cohesively a species cooperates over how compassionate it seems to be. If you look at human actions like factory farming, these seem to be less a product of some human prediliction for cruelty, and more a result of incentive structures. In a post-scarcity society, we’d expect this to be less of a consideration. But a post-scarcity society requires more than just technology. Incentive structures also seem less contingent on biological factors and more contingent on societal factors.
Multipandemic could cause human extinction. Even a single virus has had 100% kill rate.
Interesting paper! I’m intuitively skeptical, though—with 7 billion people, it just seems really hard to kill off every last person.
Where was this paper posted?
Sorry-I guess the review period for the paper on academia.edu expired. But contact Alexey: https://fromhumantogod.wordpress.com/contacts/ if you want to see the paper.
Interesting about dinosaurs. :) I added this to my piece as footnote 4 (see there for the hyperlinks):
I agree that, among ways all humans might go extinct that leave around other animals, runaway climate change and nuclear war are contenders. However, I’m skeptical that there would be many vertebrates left in these scenarios. I would think humans would try to eat every mammal, bird, and fish they could find. I guess humans couldn’t kill every last mouse or minnow, but in these scenarios, plant growth would also be compromised (or else humans would be eating plants), so it’s not clear how well these small animals could survive.
Interesting. :) But this is (perhaps very strongly) biased by the selection effect that we find ourselves here and not on the (many?) other planets where intelligent life never got to the human level.
This was a statement about selection bias (namely, that humans care more about what they care about than other civilizations do) rather than an empirical generalization from biology. I agree humans seem to be somewhere in the middle in terms of peacefulness relative to primates. Unlike cetaceans, wolves, etc., we’re not obligate carnivores. We’re also more compassionate to outgroup members than ants are, although it’s hard to say what ant morality would look like if ants were as intelligent as mammals.
I still don’t see why we should expect these future extinction events to wipe out all vertebrates when vertebrates made it through dinosaur extinction events. Most plants aren’t human-edible, and I’m skeptical humans would be systematic enough in foraging through remote wilderness to kill off more than half the wild vertebrates on the planet.
Yep.
How certain are you about this? Some quick Googling:
“The northern muriqui has been argued to be important to understanding human evolution, since it is one of the few primates that has tolerant, nonhierarchial relationships among and between males and females, a feature shared with hunter-gatherer humans, but which contrasts with the ranked relationships of most other primates.” (source)
“Male primates, in general, take very little interest in helping to rear offspring… Pair bonding of any sort is rare among primates, though gibbons seem to be lifelong monogamists, and some new world monkey groups, such as marmosets, have only one reproductively active pair in any group.” (source)
“This was also studied in rhesus macaques and pigtail macaques. They found that infants, when separated from their mothers, went though all these stages of separations- protest, despair etc. The saw the same thing with rhesus and pigtails, but in bonnet macaques, the infants don’t go through all this psychological trauma. It’s pretty clear why if you look at their social organization- there are a lot of allomothers in bonnet macaques and babies are often left by their moms in the wild and someone else will take care of it and bring it back to her later. So it’s important to pick more than one species and to compare across species when you’re doing this comparative approach for behavioral models… We also are different because we (both sexes) cooperate with non-kin pretty often.” (source—first bit is interesting because I don’t think humans really alloparent, which seems like an altruistic behavior?)
Random related thought: Somewhere I read that humans “self-domesticated” over the course of our species through e.g. capital punishment for murderers. Does that mean that we are “just cooperative enough” to be civilized? (In other words, did this “self-domestication” process occur until the point at which large scale civilization became possible, and that’s where we are right now?)
Some of this stuff might be related to the evolution of intelligence though, e.g. human babies are born prematurely relative to other species because our large heads would not fit through the birth canal otherwise. So perhaps a primate species would need to engage in pair bonding in order to make this sort of ‘premature’ birth (and thus the evolution of high intelligence) possible. This factor seems relatively contingent on primate anatomy. So maybe a non-primate-descended intelligent species would be less likely to experience pair bonding (I think it’s rare in the animal kingdom) and thus be less benevolent. (BTW, I think species that pair bond are a strict (and small) subset of species that are considered K-selected, but I could be wrong. It seems pretty likely that intelligent aliens would be K-selected in some form.)