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Comment by Gargoyle | Hacker News Reader

Hmmm. If this hypothesis held up, you'd want to factor it into the Drake Equation. Number of systems that didn't cross some threshold of intensity or frequency of arm crossing events that could cause mass extinctions often enough to make intelligent life impossible to develop.

Or something like that.

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I suppose it's possible that just the right amount of mass extinction events are necessary for intelligent life to emerge.

Too many and evolution doesn't build up any momentum, too little and there isn't enough change to make intelligence (i.e. adaptability) worth having. So the Drake equation would need to be looking for that Goldilocks zone of mass extinctions.

Isn't the reverse just as likely, that many potential paths to intelligence were snuffed out by extinction events. The currently accepted theory is that it the evolutionary pressure of climate change was enough for us to evolve intelligence.

I think that humans as a species are more likely to survive a mass extinction event (even if 99% of the population is killed) through manipulation of their environment, stored food, eating rodents, insects and fish, and the cooperation of communities for having babies and raising children. Therefore, mass extinctions might serve as a winnowing out of dominant species that can't adapt to major changes. Of course the adaptability of humans has not yet been tested in that way (unless you count the recent ice age.)

Also there is the whole "multi-planetary species" option.

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