Would spacefaring aliens have to be roughly as intelligent as humans?

Question

The idea is simple, our intellegence is so far above a chimp or bonobo as to make us something different. There are things we can do intuitively that no Bonobo or chimp will be able to, and because of this most of our technology is beyond them. They can be taught to use a specific piece in a specific way, but given a new item of technology they simply can not figure it out the way even a young child could.

I was wondering about the idea translated to Aliens. Could an Alien's intellect be so far beyond ours as ours is to a chimp? Such that even having access to their technology we couldn't figure out how to turn it on or use it (not reverse engineer it, just use basic functions that even their children could do). Could it by that when we finally meet aliens they will not only have superior technology we can't yet master, but that we simply are incapable of ever comprehending?

At first I thought the answer was an easy yes, any creature can evolve to be stronger or faster, so why not smarter. But then I realized that once you have a certain level of technological power with tools your technology starts to grow at such a rapid rate that it eclipses evolution. Our technology has grown exponentially in a thousand years, which is a blink in the eye from evolutionary standards; not enough time for any significant difference in intellect to evolve. It seems that technology would, at that point, eclipse evolution as a driving form, effectively we either create technology that is able to handle new technology for us (AI and genetic programing etc) so we don't have to be smart enough, reach some degree of trans-humanism, or kill ourselves out before evolution will have a chance to have a substantial affect on our IQ.

Thus I'm wondering, is it possible that any alien species will be on the same rough intellectual level (not technological) of humans? A few IQ points one way or another, but not an insurmountable gap that prevent one from comprehending the others technology?

Answer 1

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Arthur C. Clarke

Intelligence may be a tricky parameter to take into consideration in this case. Quoting Wikipedia, 'Intelligence has been defined in many different ways such as in terms of one's capacity for logic, abstract thought, understanding, self-awareness, communication, learning, emotional knowledge, memory, planning, creativity and problem solving.'

Let's put that definition aside for a second. Also, let's take a look at Grog. Fictitious as he was, Grog was also an anomaly - the smartest hominid ever born on Sol III. He was Leonardo da Vinci to the power of 10; an amazing capability to correlate facts and think on abstract terms.

Unfortunately, nor Grog nor Leo were able to crate a fully functional helicopter. Lesser men after them did the trick - of course, as another genius said, by standing on the shoulder of their gigantic ancestors.

Here's the thing: technological advancement is incremental. There could be a race of galactic Ents that take a full Earth day to say their names, but if they had enough time (say, a billion years of scientific advancement), then any aspect of their lives would look like magic to us, fast-paced and quick-witted but sadly primitive organisms.

Now imagine the amount of information a given alien species possessing functional interstellar spaceships have at their disposal. You need a LOT of technology in order to achieve that point. When you get to that point, when technology grows in such a exponential rate, the odds of any two species to be at roughly the same stage is very, very small - initial biological stats aside.

Wouldn't it be fair then to consider the accrued technological advances and raw information amount to be a characteristic of said civilization? Would the individual intellect be really that important, if Ents equipped with mental connectivity to their Mega-Wikipedia and processing power offloading capabilities meet us, humans typing on their tiny screens to check on how to say 'I, for one, welcome our new vegetal overlords' in Galactic Entish?

I then dare say that the intellectual level will matter very little.

Answer 2

It's difficult to compare average human intelligence against an unknown species at an unknown point in the future but any space-faring alien species we find will range from least as smart as we are to completely overshadowing us.

According to the Flynn Effect, average human intelligence has been increasing since the 1930s. There are several proposed explanations for this but nothing proven. Let's assume that this pattern of increasing intelligence increases to some biological maximum, where if we want more intelligence, we will need bigger heads. (Which raises the interesting prospect that we are getting more intelligent in general because the software our brains run is improving, not that our physical brains are getting better.)

Let's also assume that a similar pattern happened in this alien species we encounter and deep space exploration requires a certain minimum threshold of racial intelligence. (Which is reasonable. A single brilliant individual can only do so much against the staggering complexities of deep space exploration.) The longer a species explores space and the Flynn Effect continues to happen for them, their intelligence can increase to incredibly high levels.

Answer 3

Despite the human tendency to anthropomorphize things and our many mental shortcomings we have a lot of things that animals considered intelligent don't have. There are various kinds of animal intelligence that differ from us and animals have complex communications methods like us humans too. However, one thing humans excel over animals, I think, is the concept of self awareness, subjectivity, qualia and the sense of selfhood.

I think this gives us a significant edge that for the chimp comparison to work, the aliens would have to be significantly beyond us. I think almost no longer tied to same restrictions of the physical three dimensional world.

The spectrum of intelligence is huge so this is entirely possible, I would even say highly likely. So I would say that aliens would have to be about the level of intelligence as us or above to be able solve the difficulties of spacefaring that are the same everywhere where the universal constants are the same. But they could have entirely different kinds of thought patterns in many other areas, such as social intelligence etc.

Answer 4

A disturbing possibility is that as technology improves average intelligence decreases. This might be partly because technology means that intelligence ceases to make any difference to an individual's chance of propagating their genes - all children survive, anyone who wants to can reproduce - and partly because the better the technology the less intelligent an operator needs to be to use it. For example, to use a computer in the 1980s or 1990s required a higher level of intellectual engagement than it does now, and the way tech is going soon we'll be able to simply "talk to the air" to get the omnipresent AI network to perform any function.

So, no, spacefaring aliens would not have to be roughly as intelligent as present day humans. They could get away with being much less intelligent; their wonderful automated spaceships or other technology would do everything for them including develop new technology. Intelligence would not merely cease to be an evolutionary advantage but might well be a disadvantage. The same would, of course, apply to humans. It might turn out that for most species average intelligence peaks at the time when they develop technology that can improve itself - i.e. about the stage we are at now, so you would indeed get most species peaking at roughly the same level as present-day humans - but from then on it's downhill all the way.

Not a happy thought. Any convincing counter-argument as to why my argument here is wrong gratefully received!