Evolution Tells Us We Might Be The Only Intelligent Life in the Universe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bF-CvZgSPCM

I only watched the first 2.5 minutes. He said that we have no evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, as if this were an important part of his argument. Although that statement is technically correct, the distances involved are so vast that it is unlikely we could detect their radio signals—or that they could detect ours.

If we look at the evolution of life on Earth, we see incredible resilience. Once life starts, it finds a way; it adapts.

There are many examples of convergent evolution, where unrelated species independently evolve similar traits. For example, complex eyes evolved multiple times in different lineages, and several unrelated species independently evolved crab-like body plans.

What evolution shows us is that it adapts to incentives. Creatures become faster because they need to. Animals that benefit from greater intelligence evolve it. Only a few species are intelligent, while most are not, for the simple reason that they do not need to be. Intelligence is energetically expensive, and it is often more efficient not to have it.

Once life begins, I think it has the potential to produce intelligence. If we could travel to another world with life, we would likely see an enormous variety of organisms. Some of them would look familiar, because the patterns that work here could also work elsewhere.