So earthlike planets would be more plentiful than otherwise. This could be a boon to scifi plots that entail conveniently breathable atmospheres. It would also tend to support the strong anthropic principle.
But can they outgrow the trope of every alien being a human-in-a-mask?
Star Trek was never meant to be Sci-fi so much as soap opera in space.
Arrival was pretty good in showing actually alien aliens (while falling into the trope of godlike aliens).
Watch some octopus videos. You may get a sense of a certain connection, empathy, between sentients that transcends our physical forms.
So it's not entirely.. human. My point being that we can have the expressions of a human face on a non-human face
To bring up the example of the octopus again, you can still get some sense of "expression" like anger etc. when they change their skin colors, without having a relatable face at all.
Or something more common: Dogs wagging their tails, cats pointing their ears, and so on.
It's a memorable point, making it plain that normality in our sphere of experience is something that's evolved through many needles' eyes over millions of years. Different human cultures can't even relate to each other very well, and we share 5-nines of that evolutionary history.
Fundamental 'human' values are likely entirely at odds with any alien life morality we ever encounter. Thou Shall Not Kill? What about an amoebic life-form that honors its ancestors by absorbing their protoplasm, thus retaining their memories? Honor Thy Father And Mother? An insectoid race may become adult by the brood attacking, killing and eating their parent colony thus proving their fitness. Thou Shall Not Steal? That one's easy: what if property ownership is an ideal unique to territorial monkey-troop creatures with strong attraction to bling (us)? Sharing tools and food may be fundamental to every other successful race in the galaxy, humans being some aberrant race of moral deviants that prosper despite all logic to the contrary.
Even a tiny mismatch could be disastrous. What if they perceived the world only slightly faster? We would speak at the very low end of their perception; our flickering lights and video images would drive them mad. We would appear slow and stupid in every personal interaction.
(I can't find the actual darn quote).
It's poetic. Our time scale is trivial in the scope of the universe, whilst quantum time scales are trivial to ours.
> Dogs can take in visual information at least 25 percent faster than humans
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/small-animals-liv...
> Dogs can take in visual information at least 25 percent faster than humans
Something else mentioned in the Blindsight novel, and actually what gives the book it's title, is (as far as I know) a theory about the 'tension' between the conscious and subconscious parts of the brain; that there's the "lizard brain" essentially subconscious which is usually overridden by the conscious part. There's a passage in the book where the 'alien' is psychologically attacking a character causing them to go blind. The character, however, is still able to catch an item thrown to them because, whilst their conscious brain is unable to process, and therefore react to, visual cues, the "lizard brain" takes over and forces an almost subconscious reaction to catch the thrown item. The "lizard brain" is immune to the blindness-causing psychological attack (something along those lines).
Something about the visual bandwidth available via the optic nerve is rather huge compared to how much bandwidth the conscious brain can actually process. The "lizard brain" is basic, but can process the full spectrum of bandwidth available.
The 'tension' between these two systems in our heads is exemplified (in explanatory notes at the end of the book) in the scenario where one drops something hot (maybe from being held in an oven mitt) and the instant, sub-conscious reaction is to try to catch it, whilst the conscious brain has to process the individual scenario and attempt to override the default response because if we touch the thing, it will burn us.
It's god damn fascinating!
* Disclaimer: The above is my interpretation / memory, it may or may not represent what actually happens or what the author intended to convey.
Edited to add:
Woops! Sorry. That google search just leads to a plethora of racist dogma pages with pretend data labelling ethnic groups. I'd hoped for some data across a single population.
Anyway, we learned something from that. Alien races with real significant differences will be treated vastly differently. Just like we unfairly treat one another over insignificant differences.
How does it support that?
1. The only forms of life that we know about are on a planet with plentiful water and carbon dioxide.
2. Planetary dynamics may favor the production of such planets by the evaporation of gas giants.
Ergo, the rules of planetary dynamics appear to favor habitats for life as we know it.
This appearance may be just an artifact of our limited survey of life in the universe, but it's all we have.
As for the universe "favor"ing life, that doesn't really make sense either. I think it's safe to say the universe favors stars, gas giants, black holes but it's pretty hard to say the universe favors life when it's only given us ourselves as an example.
It's easy enough to imagine on Earth that conscious life never formed and to imagine such without changing the laws of physics. I don't understand anything about our universe that guarantees the existence of conscious life, let alone guarantees multiple instances.
All we can really say for certain is that our universe allows for us. We really don't know how rare we are.
Whether or not the universe favored life can be interpreted from the resulting improbability and the current results. Stars, gas giants, and black holes are probable.
We don't even know how life originated on Earth
I'm not saying these are necessarily plausible theories, but the fact that we can't discount them tells me enough about how likely we are to be able to calculate a probability for abiogenesis.
I agree that we can't know the exact means, just that abiogenesis happened, but we can still calculate the probability of our conditions needing to occur for abiogenesis to happen.
We already know that Earth as it is today can't support abiogenesis, since it's not happening, and judging from the phylogenetic tree, it probably hasn't happened for more than 3 billion years. There is also a reason to believe that even if the Earth was once appropriate for abiogenesis, it only happened once, given that all life on Earth shares the same chemistry (though of course it is possible that there was simply no other way for life to be, or that there have existed other forms of life from other abiogenesis events, but that they simply have not survived).
WAP: we're going to see selection bias in our universe because the preconditions for life must have been satisfied for us to exist within it.
SAP: all universes must satisfy the preconditions for life because cogito ergo sum -- the definition of existence requires life to perceive it.
I've probably sold SAP short because my own model of existence doesn't require perception, but clearly by this point we're well within the realm of philosophy.
Rather than cogito ergo sum, I think esse est percipi is the more appropriate phrase to use here.
esse est percipi: to be is to be perceived
The Weak Anthropic Principle from my understanding is simply that intelligent observers are possible. There's no implied likelihood or selection bias. Simply it's possible in our universe.
I'd agree with this framing.
As for the SAP, I personally find it somewhat meaningless. If that's how you define existence, then you're correct by definition.
If you believe a whole universe's existence requires perception to say it exists, I find that somewhat ridiculous. The universe came first and then came life.
Do things just pop into existence as we perceive them? And as we perceive more, does more stuff just pop into existence like all of the recently discovered lifeless exoplanets? Did those not exist until we spotted them?
I strongly believe trees fall in the forest and make sounds whether or not someone is there to hear. If you define a sound as having to be heard, then you're only correct through your own definition.
Because we of course do not exist in this universe because we're fine tuned to exist in it.
I can't think of a better way to describe it than the late Douglas Adams did :
“This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.”
The strong anthropic principle makes a statement about the fine tuning of the one and only, non-random, system that governs all systems.
I.e. the rudimentary physics & chemistry that happens to favours determine carbon based life generally.
If it were that there were parameters to tweak certainly many combinations would lead to degenerate solutions, but many that wouldn't and complexity would be found in many of them, some of it familiar, some beyond our imagination.
For mathematical dynamical systems (chaos theory) you'll find that you can tweak parameters. Some changes result in overall recognizable behavior, some changes result in completely different but still chaotic behavior, some changes result in boring, essentially empty solutions.
The universe is one big dynaimcal system; there's no reason to believe that if it is a function of certain chosen parameters, it is the only solution that would result in life.