Minimum Viable Intelligence: A conjecture I came up with, that argues that the innate unaugmented intelligence of an alien species is unlikely to be significantly higher than that of humans.
Reasoning:
Sufficiently high intelligence leads to civilization
Civilization leads to exponential technological progress
Sufficient technological progress removes evolutionary pressure for higher intelligence
Therefore, in any given environment, the minimum intelligence required to enable exponential technological progress is also roughly the maximum intelligence evolution can produce
The difficulty of an environment would dictate the minimum viable intelligence for civilization, so it is still possible for evolution to produce smarter aliens, however it seems unlikely to me that the band stretches further than a single order of magnitude at best
Note: I am talking about innate natural unaugmented intelligence of the average specimen. Excluding neuralink style augmentations or AI assisted gene editing.
Minimum Viable Intelligence: A conjecture I came up with, that argues that the innate unaugmented intelligence of an alien species is unlikely to be significantly higher than that of humans.
Reasoning:
Sufficiently high intelligence leads to civilization
Civilization leads to exponential technological progress
Sufficient technological progress removes evolutionary pressure for higher intelligence
Therefore, in any given environment, the minimum intelligence required to enable exponential technological progress is also roughly the maximum intelligence evolution can produce
The difficulty of an environment would dictate the minimum viable intelligence for civilization, so it is still possible for evolution to produce smarter aliens, however it seems unlikely to me that the band stretches further than a single order of magnitude at best
Note: I am talking about innate natural unaugmented intelligence of the average specimen. Excluding neuralink style augmentations or AI assisted gene editing.