I think this is a misunderstanding of the use of the word "paradox". Informally, people use "paradox" like it means "contradiction" when in actuality it means "APPARENT contradiction". See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox
> A paradox is a statement that, despite apparently sound reasoning from true premises, leads to an apparently self-contradictory or logically unacceptable conclusion.
The Fermi paradox is indeed an apparent contradiction, whether or not it is an actual contradiction.
The same holds for many, if not almost all uses of the word "paradox" in standard literature. For example, Zeno's Paradox is not a contradiction, we've resolved it (an infinite sum of decreasing values can add up to a finite number), and yet it is still a paradox.
(For a more precise classification, see e.g. Quine's classification of Paradoxes)
One of the crazier things I've heard recently is that the time between the present and the Tyrannosaurus Rex [1] (68-66 million years) is less than the time between the T-Rex and the Brontosaurus [2] (156-147 million years ago, or 79 million years before the T-Rex).
Really on it's own intelligence does not change much. You need both long term food storage and fire to really advance.
But no other (non-extinct) species can start a fire.
1. https://srfoundation.blogspot.com/2009/01/other-animals-with...
In particular it’s accepted in the field (I believe) that animal languages are not generative, which is to say they do not provide for production of new forms over time. Anything an animal speakes has already been spoken before because the possible set of valid sentences is strangled by lack of variability in the syntax. Intuitively, and this is where I’m going off the rails, I feel that generativity and Turing-completeness are near the same thing - they can describe something that is yet to be. Non generative language can only describe what has already been. That is constructing a new world requires description of the machinery operating that new world, whereas describing an old world you can lean on prior knowledge of the speaker and make do with a much poorer descriptive facility.
There was a linguist who brought up those five key attributes of human language as being crucial, I can’t find his name right now :(
And I did not say that animals don’t use language. Or did I?
What I mean to say is that there is a dramatic difference in expressive power, in particular in being able to convey a plan of action. Animal language can convey “there is a tiger south-south-west 15 meters, run for your life”. But it can’t express “if there is a tiger run left, if there are two tigers run to the right” unless the animals have previously encountered that situation and survived unwittingly executing this plan of action.
To me this is akin to the difference between Turing complete and subturing languages, in that the expresssive power is so very different.
Do the skills get more advanced with each generation?
Note it's not unique to dolphin as some cat species for example are known to bring back wounded prey for their young to practice with.
What would be interesting is if we found intelligent (or any!) life that evolved completely independently from our own origins.
Are you sure?I seem to recall watching random youtube videos a few weeks / months back and saw something on octopi I vaguely recall it saying they developed intelligence differently. Although probably I have got it muddled with something else :)
It is simply asking basically "if the universe is teeming with life, where is it?" and by that raising both the question of whether or not the universe actually is teeming with life, and if it is, why aren't they here? It reduces to an actual paradox only if you assume an answer to one part (the amount of life) that isn't reasonably compatible with the second part (why we haven't seen evidence of it) without a reasonable explanation.
That it simply on average takes too long for us to have seen evidence yet is in fact one of the many suggested solutions.
But overall the point of the Fermi paradox is that the problem if why we don't see aliens is two-pronged: They might never develop, or just not have developed yet, to a sufficient stage. But it's also possible they do, but that something else prevents them from contacting us.
Thus the idea of "great filters" for example. E.g. maybe the universe is full of life, but it's exceedingly rare for it to survive long enough to be able to make contact without being destroyed. Maybe the odds of getting killed off by asteroids is too high. Maybe war takes out most that get to a certain level. Maybe someone out there takes pot-shots at anyone sticking their head out? Maybe some galactic events sterilises large swathes of space too often? (intense gamma bursts have been raised as one possibility)
As well as many other options. E.g. maybe we're quarantined? Maybe we're in a simulation, and simulating aliens just isn't part of the program?