Evolution selects for immediate survival. Because intelligence is expensive, competitive species evolve enough intelligence to compete with each other. But the extra intelligence needed to guarantee successful long-term management of an entire planetary ecosystem is at the far end of the bell curve, and most individuals won't be capable of it. Likewise for effective off-world colonisation.
So you get a race between the self-destructive effects of short-sighted individual intelligence pursuing the usual goals of fighting, fucking, and accumulating resources, and the amplification effects of whatever collective intelligence mechanisms a species can evolve.
At the moment we're not doing so well with the latter. It's going to take a phase change to move collective intelligence up to a level where the likely default is long term survival.
Why do you assume that individual intelligence's are necessarily short-sighted in that sense? The existence of cultures as ongoing traditions of making indicates that individual intelligences are capable of participating in long-term, multigenerational endeavors....
Cultures, ongoing traditions, religion etc... can be seen as a way to pass on wisdom/intelligence via affirmation to the next generations. Empirically, you could say our ancestors have internalised the notion that individual intelligence isn't enough to persist knowledge at civilisation timescales and implemented mechanisms that would overwise be superfluous (eg, recounting of legends that tell of danger, flood myths, some religious codes).
This is pushing the argument a bit, but it stands to reason that this pattern of information preserval could indicate the necessity even for an 'advanced' civilisation with forward thinking individuals to reinforce diffusion/acquisition of knowledge of little short term value but high absolute value to survival/evolution
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Destroying earth and leaving a mess behind is not the output of an "intelligent" species.
It's a Darwinian bottleneck.
Evolution selects for immediate survival. Because intelligence is expensive, competitive species evolve enough intelligence to compete with each other. But the extra intelligence needed to guarantee successful long-term management of an entire planetary ecosystem is at the far end of the bell curve, and most individuals won't be capable of it. Likewise for effective off-world colonisation.
So you get a race between the self-destructive effects of short-sighted individual intelligence pursuing the usual goals of fighting, fucking, and accumulating resources, and the amplification effects of whatever collective intelligence mechanisms a species can evolve.
At the moment we're not doing so well with the latter. It's going to take a phase change to move collective intelligence up to a level where the likely default is long term survival.
Why do you assume that individual intelligence's are necessarily short-sighted in that sense? The existence of cultures as ongoing traditions of making indicates that individual intelligences are capable of participating in long-term, multigenerational endeavors....
Cultures, ongoing traditions, religion etc... can be seen as a way to pass on wisdom/intelligence via affirmation to the next generations. Empirically, you could say our ancestors have internalised the notion that individual intelligence isn't enough to persist knowledge at civilisation timescales and implemented mechanisms that would overwise be superfluous (eg, recounting of legends that tell of danger, flood myths, some religious codes).
This is pushing the argument a bit, but it stands to reason that this pattern of information preserval could indicate the necessity even for an 'advanced' civilisation with forward thinking individuals to reinforce diffusion/acquisition of knowledge of little short term value but high absolute value to survival/evolution