Quote:
Originally Posted by Fuzz
I'm not going to get into a New Era quote war, because nobody wants to see that, but damn...ok, so they are a super advanced civilization that now have transporters, but with small social units of a few people. How do you get there? How do you go from primitive to transporters, and not require the massive resource consumption of our current world? Are you mining materials with a couple people, shovel and a bucket? Refining ore? It doesn't make any sense.
Secondly, where in our evolutionary tree does this imaginary species exist? How do you slot them in, without any evidence? It's pure fantasy.
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I disagree with New Era's position for some of the same reasons you mentioned (primarily resource consumption to technological development), but I think the question of fit on the evolutionary tree is somewhat illogical.
These divisions were largely all present by ~250 million ya. Why limit our concept of intelligence to just one branch of life? That's where our evolutionary tree stems from.
There's also an unbelievable amount of diversity within that one branch of course. Even other higher order apes much closer to our evolutionary line show intelligence. But far afield, birds (particularly Corvids), cetaceans, and cephalopods show some notable indications of intelligence that we can recognize.
In short there are TONS of places that "intelligence" or advanced species could hide within the evolutionary tree of life.
Edit: or how about dinosaurs that had opposable thumbs?
https://www.insider.com/meet-the-mon...-thumbs-2021-4
Really, convergent evolution shows us that it is indeed possible for completely different strands of the evolutionary chain to build towards the same goals and abilities. Now the question can become if intelligence and society can be considered similarly to opposable thumbs.