I know I've read at least one science fiction story that's proposed non-technological space-life. I think Hoyle wrote one of them (The Black Cloud?). Are there any environments life can't find a way to inhabit, given enough time?

From our point of view, we are located at the end of Earth's history. That, of course, is nonsense, but we suffer from our human perspective. And, as yet, we have invented no means for scanning the future to see what unmade history lies ahead.

As a result, I think it is both natural and provincial for humans to regard themselves as the end-all and be-all of Creation. We may very well be one of the last experiments evolution produces, but that need not be taken as a sure sign we are what evolution 'has been trying to produce' all along.

Speaking just for myself, I don't like it when people try to assign a personality or spirit to evolution. While I will accept the Gaia hypothesis is possible, I don't like what people try to do with an evolution ruled by some invisible guiding hand. They inevitably politicize evolution in order to twist it to suit their own agendas.

Because I don't like it doesn't make it wrong, of course. There probably are hidden principles and forces acting upon life all the time, some of which have no doubt shaped and constrained evolution.

Laws govern chemistry, physics and the development of dynamical systems. Pure randomness is hard to find. I do accept that there must be laws of some kind which act upon evolution.

The one law that I have noticed in Earth's evolution is that life spreads itself out over time. It invades more niches, invents new adaptations and strategies for exploiting the environment, tries out new ways of being constantly. Those best suited for successful propogation in the environment tend to survive. We look around us and see a world far different from the Earth of 4 bya.

So Earth-life is more complex and diverse now than it ever was before. And life on Earth has gotten better and better at exploiting its environment. I pity the Mars microbe that finds itself exposed to the terrestrial biosphere - it won't be long for this world.

My opinion is that evolution does have a goal, but that goal is simply to survive better and better in a universe that seems bent on dealing out extinction and death.

So, as I wrote before, I think it's plainly obvious that life has acquired more depth and breadth over time. For me, the arrival of technological intelligence is similar to the arrival of birdflight.

Or, to put it another way, when life begins on a planet, it does not immediately produce either technological intelligence or birdflight. Life has to spread out, through space, through time, through phase space.

Technological intelligence doesn't happen overnight. Neither does birdflight.

I don't think evolution needed to produce technologically intelligent beings like hominids any more than it needed produce winged creatures like birds. I don't think there was any chance at all that organisms of such complexity would have been first on the scene 4 bya. Yet they're here now. The probability of these adaptations being tried has obviously gone up since then.

Makes me wonder if there are yet more surprises in store. Life has found more than one way to go about flight; birds don't own the copyright. Is technological intelligence an adaptation that must remain the exclusive property of humans? Or will other organisms, soon or perhaps a billion years from now, pick up that wild card?

Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence