I had read about that. They are an amazingly successful species. Still, the hives are effectively clones and have limited ability to "work" together or compete against.

If you just think about biomass as a measure of species success, then bacteria are probably the winners. Ants are probably pretty competitive with us. We will have a chance to extend our habitat off world and that may make us the ultimate winners. However, we will probably take many species with us, so it is probably better to think about all life on earth as a "life system." The question should not be about whether a single species achieves "radio telescope making ability", but whether a life system evolves with elements that have that ability.

The question we are trying to answer is how probable is it that an evolutionary optimization program working on a life system will exhibit the key feature "civilization level intelligence"(CLI). The original paper makes the valid point that it is certainly not easy or else we would probably have a number of species on earth that reach that state.

My perspective is to think in terms of this hill climbing evolutionary optimization program and try to isolate the major advances in the evolutionary tree. Then try to figure out how much luck was involved in making the leap. Was it an inevitable convergence or was it a bizzarre stroke of circumstance? Personally, I think the universe is rife with planets that have the basic chemical soups to get started.

I pretty much think that multicellular (the urge to cooperate embodied as a strategy) is inevitable. I think sensory apparati is inevitable, as well as specialized cells to process the results--which leads to "brains" and ultimately big brains. At this point, I start to think specific circumstances of the habitat and "luck" may play significant roles as to how the evolution of the life system plays out.

Clearly, big brains are not sufficient in themselves to yield a CLI. And although I believe hand equivalents are necessary it is not sufficient even with big brains (most primates). Anyway my main questions revolve around those final thresholds to get from "octopi" to CLI. Thinking about the earth it seems like there are some aspects of the oceans that limit the final transitions, so I am thinking that you probably need a mix of water and land bodies, or at least earth equivalent land habitats (maybe some kind of complex water cave world on an alien planet). Or maybe you just need some key luck in evolving an octopi like creature that has few offspring and lives long.

I'm fascinated by our astrobiological and extrasolar planet hunting to gain perspective as to how many life laboratories might be out their in our galaxy. I look forward to more genetic sleuthing and genetic engineering experiments on our own planet. Hopefully we will get a better handle on our own evolutionary circumstances and by implication some idea of the chances of it happening elsewhere.