Wheels. They’re in almost every complex mechanism made by mankind, and are popularly described as the most important invention ever made. It’s worth noting that not every civilization has invented the wheel (uncontacted island or rainforest tribes come to mind) but it’s still incredibly ubiquitous and widespread.
Almost as common as wheels themselves are the discussions their existence sparks. There’s a lot of discussion around the question of if the wheel is even necessarily required for a civilization to progress beyond the post-hunter-gatherer stage—the Aztecs didn’t use wheels for transportation, and they constructed massive stepped pyramids similar in scale to those built by the ancient Egyptians.
Another place the wheel is conspicuously absent is in nature. As far as we know, humans are the only species to roll things on wheels for transportation purposes. (There are certain types of bacterial flagella which work like corkscrews, and these are the only known occurrence of rotating locomotion in nature—their evolution is a really interesting rabbit hole to go down, and involves the repurposing of old parts in the system.)
There’s been a lot of scientific inquiry into potential reasons for nature’s wheelessness, and we think it really comes down to the fact that evolution is blind. A solution to locomotion which requires two steps, the first of them heavily detrimental (half a wheel really doesn’t do anyone any good) will be passed over for a simpler approach like legs, which give new benefits at every step. Basically, the only reason humans created wheels and evolution didn’t is that we can imagine, “hey, what if I…” instead of just going with what works bit by bit by bit.
And this brings me to something really interesting:
since wheels require a detrimental adaptation before any positive payoff, they could serve as a fantastic test for whether something was created by intelligent beings.
If in the future we discover microscopic life on exoplanets or comets or something, and it has wheels, that’s something which to me would make it seem quite likely that we were dealing with bioengineered life—something specifically engineered by other, more complex creatures somewhere else (perhaps an older interstellar civilization which eventually collapsed).
So the first sign of intelligent life far from earth… could be wheels.
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