I read a long time ago an essay by Asimov that described what elements could support life as a building block and why most elements cannot. I didn’t fully understand that at the time but it was interesting to see why carbon based makes sense and some other random element does not work.
Similarly, I wonder if under different planetary conditions, smart alien life (so not single cell life) can be very tiny or very large, or if there are biological constraints that would restrict that size range regardless of basic setup.
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Intelligence, the way I see it, is relative behavioral adaptive advantage. Put in a cockpit as a chess player, the faster you can figure out how to land the plane safely the smarter you are. Unless people know you were forced into that situation, in that moment you will be dumber to most people than a pilot in your stead until you prove to others you fit within the environmental niche by successfully landing the plane.
Now, efficiency, that has to do with energy and entropy, right? You need to efficiently perform the correct observations and actions in sequence before you’re awarded the title of intelligent. That means information has to travel at a resonant efficiency to each time window.
An entity that has a really large brain would necessarily have to have information travel a longer distance before actions can be performed, but there would be a variety of space to store actions at least. There are whales known for picking up right where they left off on songs they sang together a year prior. An entity with a really small brain would necessarily have information traveling very short distances prior to performing actions out of a very limited pool. Somewhere in the middle fits most of the niches we’re into.
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