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That’s a question for you, dear reader. Are humans really the most intelligent species on the planet?
Your first instinct might be to say, of course! We’ve discovered so much and progressed so much. We have the periodic table of elements. We can generate power with controlled nuclear fission. We know in detail how our bodies work, we can manufacture specific substances to treat illnesses, and we can directly edit the genetic code. We’ve been to space and the moon, taken pictures of stellar bodies that are unfathomable distances away, and we’ve achieved atmospheric flight on a planet before a human has ever set foot on it. We created computers and the internet, which are marvels in their own right. Of course we are the most intelligent species!
And to that I’d say, sure, those are all incredible discoveries. But they are book smarts. We’re sort of like the guy who read all the books on ‘picking up’ girls in a club, and then has trouble even engaging in conversation. For all our focus on details and breaking things down into their constituent parts from our point of view, we miss the big picture. Just like how you can analyze all individual letters in this paragraph, but that’ll tell you nothing about the meaning of the text.
The problem is, we’re too quick to assume we know everything, and reject things that don’t fit our model. We know everything in detail from our point of view, but what even is dark energy and dark matter? How come two particles can act exactly the same way at the same time even though there is nothing connecting them? How do mycelia use electrical signals to communicate through a forest floor? And when you move away from the physical world that we can see, we know even less. What effect does our mental state have on our physical state? There is an effect, but we know little about it.
There’s so much that we don’t know, yet we assume that we know everything, and that we’re the only beings that are actually intelligent. Yet plants are intelligent too – they move to places with better conditions, like more sun. It’s just on a very different time scale, so we don’t notice.
And what has our “book smarts” knowledge cost us? Yes, we’ve made amazing discoveries, but at this rate we’re hurtling towards extinction. We know so much, yet all we’ve done is destroyed our environment and taken many other species with us. Is that a sign of intelligence?
Another example: horoscopes are commonly dismissed as ‘pseudoscience’. Now I’m not saying I believe in them, but I can’t fully reject the idea either. Horoscopes are based on movements of planets and stars. We know Newton’s law of universal gravitation: $F = G \frac{m_1 m_2}{r^2}$, with G the gravitational constant, $m_1$ and $m_2$ the masses of two objects, $r$ the distance between their centers, and $F$ the gravitational force they exert on each other. Take two objects, for example the Earth for $m_1$ and Sirius A for $m_2$. Then you get that $F \propto \frac{1}{r^2}$. So, as the distance between the two objects increases, the gravitational force they exert on each other becomes very very small. If you work it out, the gravitational effect of Sirius A on Earth is around 247 giga-Newtons (for comparison, the force of the Sun on the Earth is around $35.4 \times 10^{12}$ GN). But the key point is: it’s never zero. A human on earth is being affected by the gravity of Sagittarius A*, with a force of $5.63 \times 10^{-13}$ N. We just don’t consciously feel it because the gravitational force of the Earth is much, much stronger. The conclusion is that we’re in the gravitational fields of an innumerable amount of objects, and those fields all interact with each other. We also know that gravity affects space-time. The effects would be incredibly tiny at this scale. But who’s to say these gravitational interactions have no effect?
Consider a fish in an aquarium. It might be the smartest fish in its aquarium, it might even consider itself the most intelligent being in the aquarium. It might know the physics of every single pebble, the exact behavior of the water. The fish might know exactly what happens when it stops swimming at the surface and slowly drops to the bottom, it might know exactly how shapes change because of lensing in the water. But then one day it jumps out of the aquarium, and suddenly everything outside has a slightly different shape, and suddenly gravity is a real problem. splat. That’s all I’m saying. Perhaps we should stop thinking we know everything.