The “Thinking Beyond” webinar series features renowned physicists Paul Davies, Sara Walker and Maulik Parikh from the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University and addresses big questions/topics in science. This month, Roland Fletcher will present the topic and will be joined by Paul Davies and Maulik Parikh.
October 2024 Thinking Beyond- The Evolution Intelligence on Earth and Implications for SETI
How likely is it that big-brained intelligence evolves on an earthlike planet? Clues can be gained from a quantitative study of hominin evolution over the past 100,000 years, especially tool-making, site utilization and long-distance communication strategies. The human ecological footprint begins with stone tools and bone debris and continues into built space and the use of durable materials. The historical evidence suggests accelerating rates of punctuated spatial expansion and, more generally, accelerating rates of behavioral change. Extrapolating these results into the future has profound implications for human destiny and the search for extraterrestrial technosignatures.
Roland Fletcher is Professor of Theoretical and World Archaeology at the University of Sydney. He completed his PhD at Cambridge University in 1975 and has worked at the University of Sydney since 1976. In 1995 he published The Limits of Settlement Growth with Cambridge University Press in which he developed the Interaction-Communication Model and its associated matrix diagram. He used the model to predict that Angkor was a vast agrarian-based, low-density city and initiated the interdisciplinary research program of the Greater Angkor Project. From the research on Angkor he has expanded the global analysis of low-density settlement patterns in archaeology and the relationship to present-day urbanism. He has also continued the research on the Interaction-Communication Model to analyse the dynamic, interacting evolutionary relationship between human action and material behaviour.
Roland has been a Distinguished Fellow of Durham University’s Institute of Advanced Study and an annual residential fellow at the Danish National Urban Networks Centre, an invited speaker at the Falling Walls Conference in Berlin and a keynote speaker at the Chinese Institute of Urban Planners symposium in Nanjing and the Shanghai World Archaeological Forum. He is currently continuing his research on the large-scale outcomes of human behaviour.