/sci/ - Science & Math

I have been pondering a wierd thought experiment.

You have an army of 1,000,000 men and are fighting an opponent with an army of 500,000 men. Your opponent makes an offer to you: He will let you choose X amount of your soldiers to fight his soldiers at the same total ratio: 2-1 and the winner wins the war. For example: If you choose 10,000 men they will fight against 5,000 men.

You assume that all men on both sides are equally skilled, and the warfare style doesn’t change even with an increase in men i.e. You dont have different weapons or tactics depending on the quanity of fighters.

You are a leader who wants to win the war and wants the least absolute deaths possible. How do you decide how many men to fight with?

I hope this makes sense.

A lot of people think it's likely. Given the sheer size of the universe, some life somewhere must be intelligent like us, right? But is that really a good argument? I don't think it's likely. Think about it.

Human level intelligence is a result of a series of very specific environmental pressures throughout billions of years, and organisms adapting to those pressures. The "classic" alien we usually think about when we think the word "alien" is a hominid-like organism able to build civilizations, basically just a copy of humans, except more advanced maybe. To get something like human-level intelligence elsewhere, you don't just need a planet within a habital zone, you need a planet that has Earth's exact history (ice comets coming and flooding the planet, amino acids and other life ingredients forming, the evolution of eukaryotes, the evolution of multicellularity, the evolution of sexual reproduction, the evolution of brains, etc.), size (roughly, as animals evolve to adapt to gravity), and a bunch of other factors I'm probably leaving out; pretty unlikely.