A reader writes:
There is a rather important point that undermines Tom Maudlin's argument. While it's true that there's only been one Earth species to develop technology (us), that's largely because we eliminated the competition. We killed the Neanderthals and every other species that's shown the potential for technology. (And the few still around with potential – dolphins, apes, etc. – we have contained and have stunted their avenues for evolution.) That makes it far less meaningful that we're the only species to develop technology – we stacked that deck ourselves, and so it's not reasonable to extrapolate from it.
Another point about aliens and technology: it doesn't much matter whether it is likely or not that aliens will develop technology, at least not for our own, practical purposes. Given our relatively poor progress in getting off planet and out of our solar system in recent decades (after the Apollo boom), we're not apt to be visiting anyaliens on their own planets. So any aliens we do meet in, say, the next century, will almost certainly have high technology. Otherwise, they're not going to be visiting our solar system.
Another writes:
The Maudlin interview you linked was fascinating, and his observation about intelligence having evolved only once on earth is definitely worthy of further contemplation. However, it's not exactly right for him to conclude that intelligence isn't very useful, or there would other species besides humans that are intelligent, such as intelligent beetles. It could also be that our kind of intelligence is very hard to evolve, requiring an unlikely series of evolutionary events.
For example, it could be that the intermediate stages between normal animal intelligence and human intelligence have selective disadvantages, or that an organism needs to accumulate a large number of unlikely traits simultaneously before the move from animal to human intelligence can happen. In fact, that is the current scientific consensus: that it took many specific alterations in anatomy and metabolism from that of our common ancestor before we could evolve our very unique brains.
It is also worth pointing out that biologically modern humans were around a very long time before we invented civilization and technology. We don't really know why it took so long for humans to make that leap. We also don't really understand just how differently our brains are wired because we have grown up in a technological civilization, by comparison to our pre-civilization ancestors, but we do know that the wiring of the brain is heavily influenced by our childhood experiences and education, so it's almost certain that our intelligence is different from theirs, despite having pretty much the same genes. So it's possible that there is more to the story than just biology. One can speculate that there may have been other organisms that were close to having the right capacities, but didn't make the leap, for whatever reason.
Another:
You write that Tim Maudlin "pops a certain science fiction bubble" with his assessment that technologically-inclined intelligence would be quite rare. In fact, such is the long-standing assessment factored into the Drake Equation, which itself dates back to about 1960. The issue is that there are so very many stars in the galaxy that even with vanishingly small probabilities apiece of developing technology the odds of an advanced race remain quite high overall. Sci-fi's bubble remains intact.
The Dish 