| rdfs:comment
| - ETI refers to Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. For our purposes, we can consider "Life" to include any organisms brought forth via evolution by natural selection. More broadly, life may include creatures that do not evolve, as a creature that maintains metabolism and homeostasis and so on might very well be considered alive. It may also include non-natural, artificial, selection - artificial life. And it may include stranger forms of evolution, as for example a process by which a certain organism is always improved and changed rather than breeding and competing with its descendants. However, let us limit ourselves to an understanding of life as the arisal of evolutionary processes against the background of a lifeless natural universe.
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| abstract
| - ETI refers to Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. For our purposes, we can consider "Life" to include any organisms brought forth via evolution by natural selection. More broadly, life may include creatures that do not evolve, as a creature that maintains metabolism and homeostasis and so on might very well be considered alive. It may also include non-natural, artificial, selection - artificial life. And it may include stranger forms of evolution, as for example a process by which a certain organism is always improved and changed rather than breeding and competing with its descendants. However, let us limit ourselves to an understanding of life as the arisal of evolutionary processes against the background of a lifeless natural universe. Even this limited vision leaves a lot of room. There are many, many options and possible scenarios for such life, with greater or lesser plausibility. This page will be concerned with exploring the ramifications of a single development - the arisal of an intelligent, technological civilization. As it is unlikely that we'll be ever capable of discovering more that fragmentary and partial information about any non-intelligent life form, and even less likely that we'll be able to learn from it, it is this scenario that is of greatest interest. It is generally accepted that an intelligent technological civilization should be rare in the galaxy, even rarer than extraterrestrial life which may itself be quite rare. It may be that no such civilization other than our own's exists. Nevertheless, we will take it as a given. In this page, we will argue for a highly 'limited' view of exobiology, under which the constraints posed by physics, the nature of the evolutionary process, and the requirement of ending up with a technological civilization severely limit the variability of life. We will present arguments to show that many aspects of biochemistry, anatomy, psychology, and social structure can be derived from these general principles with a high degree of assurance. It is necessary to make clear, however, that even a very likely element need not be actually correct in practice. Since there are a myriad of aspects, each one independent of the other, we would not expect every single likely feature to be exhibited. Rather, we would expect most likely features to be exhibited, with every specific intelligent species missing some of the likely features at random. As a final note on our methodology, these are based on our current understanding of physics and the laws of nature in general. There is no point in positing hitherto unknown principles. Furthermore, we will adopt the view that convergent evolution serves as a powerful argument for the universality of a given biological feature. We will also make the rather vain assumption that if something developed in a certain way in our world, it is at least a priori likely that it is a fairly regular way for life to evolve. Arguments to the contrary will need to show why earthbound conditions will not be typical for extreterrestrial life, not vice versa.
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