(Aug 18, 2021 12:28 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: Life could still evolve easily, intelligence not so much.
Yes. There seems to have been life on Earth for something like 3.5 to 4 billion years. Recognizable multicellular life appeared maybe 600 million years ago. Prior to that it was basically just microorganisms. The first homnins were just a few million years ago. The first anatomically modern humans only a few hundred thousand years ago. And technological civilization is ony about 250 years old.
So not only would an alien planet have to have given birth to life (perhaps a small likelihood), it would have had to have produced something like our animals (bacteria wouldn't suffice) and they would have be intelligent and will need to have used that intelligence to produce some kind of very advanced science and technology.
My guess is that technologically advanced alien civilizations are probably very few and far between.
Quote:The only reason we may have it is because our species was too weak physically to survive. Intelligence was a freak of nature/evolution. An adaptation that may have been lucky enough, by the slimmest of margins, to actually take hold.
I think that our unique adaptation wasn't speed, strength or big teeth, it was
adaptability. Humans are the general purpose animals of the animal kingdom, not naturally best at anything, but reasonably good at everything.
And not only that, we have
very flexible behavior, able to adjust in real time to changing conditions, without having to wait hundreds of generations for evolution to do it. So humans left tropical Africa and soon were found up on the subarctic tundra hunting wooly mammoths.
Our not-so-secret weapon was
language (it's impossible to get humans to shut up) and the ability to coordinate complex behavior in groups and pass along what had been learned to everyone else.
Quote:Even if we are alone, there’s no timetable that I know of that schedules the arrival of intelligent beings. For all we know, we could be the first. 15-18 bn yrs to get to this point could be the gestation period for intelligence in this universe.. There’s a long way to go..
There may only be a few species like us in this galaxy, one per every billion stars or something.
Or alternatively, intelligent life with science and technology may be all over the place. We just don't know.
Quote:Why do we assume any or all intelligences would look to conquer interstellar space?
If many alien lifeforms live in oceans covered by shells of ice, like the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, they may have no knowledge at all of the wider universe. Their known universe has a roof over it and to them that's all there is. They might just have their little ocean floor huts and the dramas of their own lives. They might not only have no interest in interstellar space, they might be unable to even conceive of what it is.