Sticks and stones vs guns…
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And . . . ? Some people like a challenge. There are threads dedicated to “Challenge Runs”. Why not “Confront a potentially maxed out industrial species as an awakening/society stage species” Challenge? Why not a “Sticks and Stones vs Guns” Challenge? Sticks and stones can be lethal.
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Sounds like some FGs…
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I don’t think it’s feasible for such a confrontation to ever end in the new sapients “winning”. That’d be like the North Sentinelese winning against a WW2 era humanity.
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I think the only way for the non societal player life to survive for long is if the society chooses not to expand on its habitats, so again, they are at the mercy of the sapient species.
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Or just waiting in hiding until the older species leaves the planet…
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What about cetaceans?
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They’re a marine species so it doesn’t matter much anyways since it’s not like they would get beyond society. That being said I suppose their mouth could potentially fulfill the toolwielding purpose.
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Yes but the existence of sperm whales proves that highly advanced intelligence isn’t just for tool use. I think getting to awakening as a non tool using creature should be possible but there should be a warning that tells you that you might not be able to progress forward if you proceed without handling limbs and such.
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I suppose that would work. Like how underwaters civs can’t progress past society, limbless species can’t progress past awakening, correct?
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There’s a reasonable amount of evidence the primary evolutionary pressure for intelligence is social skills. Think about it, if you’re smart enough to invent fire with a chance of one in a thousand, and the guy next to you is intelligent enough to use fire if someone smart explains it to him (but could only invent it with like a one in ten million chance) what actual reproductive advantage do you hold? Maybe a potential mate would prefer to have kids with an inventor, but if you do invent fire, the other guy just needs a bit of luck using the fire for something to get comparable reproductive benefits (scare away a lion or two while you’re busy teaching kids how to roast meat). There’s no evolutionary advantage to incremental improvements in tool use. Obviously most of us would prefer to have kids with someone who can support our kids with tools and skills over someone with no technological skills, but that gap isn’t going to exist and when it does you aren’t going to be in the same tribe. Reminder: you can teach someone who’s pretty stupid how to use tools, even if they invent nothing. There is a huge benefit to out-thinking other proto-sapients. If you can convince people of things, you’ll likely ave more kids, live longer, be able to secure positions of power for your children or relatives, etc. Of course, three generations in, the whole tribe has all your useful talking genes, how does anyone get advantage? Creativity: everyone suspects you giving them a gift is a bid for their help, so give a random member of the tribe a gift to divert all attention on them. That creativity will translate to useful tool use later, because when you need to take down that mammoth, your creative brain parts will be actively searching sections of the possibility space just because they don’t seem obvious, and you’ll realize the only thing that seems to able to kill all large animals is a fall off a cliff, etc. I think exceptions exist, and i could be wrong, but the only example I can think of is octopuses, who don’t seem to use intelligence to predict other members of their species, but their general environment. They also don’t live too long, so I don’t expect octopuses to attain sapience.
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Speaking of, what should be the minimum lifespan of a species to allow it to build civs?
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Probably longer than the lifespan of a Mayfly lifecycle.
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Obviously. Do the corvids live long enough for instance?
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Another important question would be if corvid-like, or octopus-like, or any player-made organism similar to Earth organisms, but having longer lifespans than their normal Earth counterparts, would help achieve sapience?
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It certainly would, as more time generally means the elders will be smarter and better at transferring knowledge.
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Octopuses may be anti-social, but they do use a variety of cues to predict whether another octopus, or a creature they just met, like a human, wants to fight, procreate, ignore, or study them. They must determine such things quickly.
It wouldn’t be so much better at transferring knowledge as having time to transfer a larger quantity of knowledge. A shorter lived species might need to need to have a lot of specialists who each learn one subject well.
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Would a single-digit-earth-year lifespan sapients still be viable then?
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Probably not. Even mastering one subject could take longer than that, let alone having time to expand upon and/or use the knowledge. Though some species/people do learn things very quickly. Perhaps if a species had photographic memory? With the right books, such a creature could learn a lot very quickly.
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What should we assume was the lifespan of humans in their awakening stage?