We are too stupid to grasp how stupid we are\u2014but smart enough to worry about it. That asymmetry defines the human condition better than any philosophical treatise. And it’s precisely this that should keep us from drawing hasty conclusions about what kinds of Aliens we might encounter in space.<\/p>
Let’s start with the invoice for intellect, because the Universe gives nothing for free.<\/p>
In his book “One Hand Clapping,” NYU neurobiologist Nikolay Kukushkin presents a calculation that should sober up anyone who thinks that intelligence is an evolutionary goal in and of itself. A gram of brain tissue consumes ten times more energy than the average gram of the human body. Our brain makes up about 2% of body mass but devours 20% of the total energy budget. It’s like keeping a Ferrari in the garage\u2014just in case you need to go get milk.<\/p>
And now the key point that Kukushkin expresses with merciless precision: if it paid off for rhinos to have twice as large a brain, they would certainly<\/em> have evolved it. Millions of years is plenty of time to test any promising strategy. We aren’t geniuses who “cracked the code” that was inaccessible to other species. Rather, we are a species that found itself in such a specific ecological niche that this absurdly costly organ actually paid off.<\/p> The question is: what was the niche?<\/p> The social brain hypothesis, which Kukushkin discusses, offers a surprisingly down-to-earth answer. If you measure the size of the cerebral cortex across different primate species and compare it with the typical size of their social groups, the points fall along a surprisingly predictable straight line. More friends = a larger brain. Humans are record-holders in both categories\u2014our cortex is relatively the largest, and the typical social group of hunter-gatherers numbered about 150 people. That\u2019s the famous “Dunbar\u2019s number,” which interestingly correlates with contemporary observations: corporate organizations also sometimes split into units of just that size.<\/p> We didn’t become intelligent to build rockets. We became intelligent to remember who lent whom a bone and whether the neighbor from the cave next door actually returned those berries he promised.<\/p> Gossip made us human.<\/p> All of this has fascinating implications for astrobiology\u2014a field that typically focuses on the chemical and climatic conditions of life, rather than on the social conditions of intelligence.<\/p> Let’s first consider scenarios involving “less intelligent” Aliens.<\/p> A planet with lower biological productivity (less sunlight, poorer soil, slower carbon cycles) automatically lowers the brain’s “profitability ceiling”. If every calorie is critical to survival, the luxury of maintaining an energy-hungry speculative organ becomes unattainable. Such worlds could produce life, even complex life, even social life\u2014but the threshold at which a bigger brain stops paying off would be much lower.<\/p> Imagine a planet where the local version of Homo erectus never had the economic motivation to become Homo sapiens. Intelligent beings, yes, but intelligent in a way we would consider acceptable in particularly clever dogs. Capable of cooperation, communication, even simple tool use. But without that leap into abstraction that allowed us to invent mathematics, religion and literary fiction.<\/p> Such civilizations\u2014if they deserved the word at all\u2014 could exist for billions of years in a state that we, with our megalomania, would call stagnation. They could call it equilibrium.<\/p> The oceans are an even more interesting case.<\/p> Water conducts heat away much faster than air, so maintaining a constant body temperature in the ocean requires particularly efficient thermoregulation. And yet whales and dolphins have evolved impressive brains. How did they manage it?<\/p> The answer is probably the social dimension: life in groups, complex communication, multigenerational transmission of knowledge about migratory routes. But the oceans at the same time limit the development of technology: it’s hard to light a fire underwater. This suggests an intriguing category of Aliens: intelligent, social beings, perhaps cultural, but forever trapped in a pre-technological stage of development. Philosophers without industry. Poets without writing. Silent geniuses whose signals we will never intercept, because they will never send them. Does this remind you of Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea, too?<\/p> Now let’s reverse the vector of speculation. What conditions could compel an intelligence greater<\/em> than ours?<\/p> The first path is arithmetically simple: more social relationships. If 150 friends require a brain our size, what would tracking 1,500 relationships require? 15,000?<\/p> One can imagine planets with longer-lived life\u2014slower metabolism, lower gravity reducing the body\u2019s wear and tear. Beings living five hundred years would have to remember much more history, more alliances and betrayals, more long-term commitments. Their brains would have to be not only larger, but organized differently, with archives where we have only current working memory.<\/p> The second path concerns the spatial dimension.<\/p> We humans have essentially evolved in two dimensions\u2014on the surface of the Earth. Whales navigate in three dimensions, but in relatively small groups. What if there is a species that combines a dense, three-dimensional environment with an intense social life?<\/p> Imagine a forest canopy on a planet with lower gravity\u2014hundreds of levels, thousands of corridors, an environment where a “neighbor” could be above you, below you, or in any combination of directions. The social map of such a world would not be a plane but a three-dimensional network. The number of potential interactions grows exponentially. The brain needed to navigate such a network would have to possess spatial abilities that, to us, would be supernatural.<\/p> The third path is the most speculative, but also the most literary: asynchronous communication as an evolutionary pressure.<\/p> Our intelligence evolved in the context of conversations\u2014synchronous, ephemeral, limited to the reach of the voice. But what if a species developed the ability to leave lasting chemical messages? Not simple pheromones like “I was here” or “there is food here,” but complex molecular narratives, chemical stories that can be left to descendants, scent libraries accumulating the knowledge of generations?<\/p> Such a species would have to be intelligent in order to “write” and “read” in a medium incomparably more complex than our alphabets. Their brains would have to contain something like a chemical interpreter, an organ that we do not possess even in rudimentary form.<\/p> And here we come to an issue that may be the most important, though usually overlooked in discussions of extraterrestrial intelligence.<\/p> If intelligence is not the goal of evolution but an adaptive strategy\u2014a costly strategy and by no means universally optimal\u2014then the galaxy may be full of life without<\/em> being full of intelligence. And among those rare pockets of consciousness, most may be so far below or above our level that communication is out of the question.<\/p> We occupy a very specific point on this scale\u2014a point that may be astronomically rare not because we are exceptionally perfect, but because we are exceptionally intermediate<\/em>.<\/p> Smart enough to ask questions about the Universe. Not smart enough to keep the answers from overwhelming us.<\/p> Maybe this is precisely the sweet spot of evolution\u2014the Goldilocks zone of the intellect, where one can still feel curiosity without being crushed by the burden of understanding. Rhinos probably don’t suffer from ignorance. Perhaps truly intelligent beings don’t suffer for a different reason, because they already know everything there is to know and have long since stopped being excited by it.<\/p> We are in between. Stupid enough to still wonder. Wise enough to know that we wonder.<\/p> Maybe this is the best the universe has to offer.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Why aliens may be either as boring as rhinos or so intelligent that we won’t survive it<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":247,"featured_media":17582,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"rank_math_lock_modified_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[863,796],"tags":[],"popular":[],"difficulty-level":[],"ppma_author":[614],"class_list":["post-17710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education-and-science","category-hai-premium-2"],"acf":[],"authors":[{"term_id":614,"user_id":247,"is_guest":0,"slug":"prof-dr-hab-dariusz-jemielniak","display_name":"prof. dr hab. Dariusz Jemielniak","avatar_url":{"url":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/maxresdefault-1-e1742292469999.jpg","url2x":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/maxresdefault-1-e1742292469999.jpg"},"first_name":"Dariusz","last_name":"Jemielniak","user_url":"","job_title":"","description":"Profesor zarz\u0105dzania Akademii Leona Ko\u017ami\u0144skiego, gdzie kieruje katedr\u0105 MINDS (Management in Networked and Digital Societies). Pracuje te\u017c jako faculty associate w Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society na Harvardzie. Wiceprezes Polskiej Akademii Nauk. Cz\u0142onek Rady Programowej CampusAI."}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/247"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17710"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17710\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17711,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17710\/revisions\/17711"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17710"},{"taxonomy":"popular","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/popular?post=17710"},{"taxonomy":"difficulty-level","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/difficulty-level?post=17710"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimagazine.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=17710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}