Is human-like intelligence an aberration?

[Delta4Embassy]

Thinking of the possibility of alien life, as one does (heh,) I consider the Earth and history of life on it. Seems there's been millions of forms of life on just our planet, but only 1 intelligent technological species, us. Planet existed with life for billions of years before intelligent life occured. So might this hold true for the whole universe? Lots of planets with life, lots of life on each planet, but maybe planets with intelligent life are the exception and not the rule? Do planets need an intelligent species to fill some niche in the ecosystem and hierachy of species? Or can planets with life exist, evolve, and die all without ever giving rise to intelligent technological species?

Fact is, that while life seems likely and common, even here it's only happened once that it developed technology and that took billions of years. If technologicial life is common, it's curious the universe isn't abuzz with radio transmissions like we crank out. It's quiet out there. And we need to figure out why if alien life is a given. Might well be a given, but technological life may be a freak occurence.

 

[September]

Who knows. There might be biomecahnical gods out where just waitin to destroy us

 

[Searcher44]

Thinking of the possibility of alien life, as one does (heh,) I consider the Earth and history of life on it. Seems there's been millions of forms of life on just our planet, but only 1 intelligent technological species, us. Planet existed with life for billions of years before intelligent life occured. So might this hold true for the whole universe? Lots of planets with life, lots of life on each planet, but maybe planets with intelligent life are the exception and not the rule? Do planets need an intelligent species to fill some niche in the ecosystem and hierachy of species? Or can planets with life exist, evolve, and die all without ever giving rise to intelligent technological species?

Fact is, that while life seems likely and common, even here it's only happened once that it developed technology and that took billions of years. If technologicial life is common, it's curious the universe isn't abuzz with radio transmissions like we crank out. It's quiet out there. And we need to figure out why if alien life is a given. Might well be a given, but technological life may be a freak occurence.

I often muse on Fermi's paradox as well. The rationalist's mind tells him there must be at least thousands of intelligent life forms "out there" when he considers the number of stars in the Universe;

"As many stars as there are in our galaxy (100 – 400 billion), there are roughly an equal number of galaxies in the observable universe—so for every star in the colossal Milky Way, there’s a whole galaxy out there. All together, that comes out to the typically quoted range of between 1022 and 1024 total stars, which means that for every grain of sand on every beach on Earth, there are 10,000 stars out there.

The science world isn’t in total agreement about what percentage of those stars are “sun-like” (similar in size, temperature, and luminosity)—opinions typically range from 5% to 20%. Going with the most conservative side of that (5%), and the lower end for the number of total stars (1022), gives us 500 quintillion, or 500 billion billion sun-like stars." - The Fermi Paradox

It wasn't very long ago I thought with the speed of our technological progress the intuition I had (the existence of thousands of other civilizations in the Universe) would be proven fact in my lifetime. Now I'm just hoping NASA or somebody might discover evidence of past or present bacterial life on Mars, and they better hurry up.

A really starry sky seems vast—but all we’re looking at is our very local neighborhood. On the very best nights, we can see up to about 2,500 stars (roughly one hundred-millionth of the stars in our galaxy), and almost all of them are less than 1,000 light years away from us (or 1% of the diameter of the Milky Way).

 

[Vastator]

I think that in the search for alien life ; many scientists have painted themselves into a corner...
They keep looking for earth-like planets. If earth were still some sort of womb of life; we would see new, and separate genetic material, coalescing out of our Eden like environment. But we don't.
All the genetic material on this planet can be roughly followed back to a single organism. I don't think this is seriously challenged in the scientific community.
In other words with a little more time. And a little more technology; we should be able to back trace, and reproduce any lower organism in our family tree.
And that's just it. A tree. One tree. One strand of DNA. Not a forest of genetic trees. One would think such an "ideal", "Goldilocks Zone" would produce, and repeat.

 

[Dont Taz Me Bro]

It seems to be for some humans

 

[Damaged Eagle]

How do you know with the nearly four billion years of history this planet has that human beings are the first intelligent life form that evolved on Earth?

*****CHUCKLE******