> Slow down there. Nobody is looking for "human intelligence" on other planets. Maybe that's why you think it's impossible. I'd say dolphins are intelligent. So are some of our computer systems. There's a lot more intelligence that we can recognize that isn't like ours.
When I think of intelligent alien life, I think along the lines of Klingons, not alien dolphins. Are we going to find alien dolphins? Absolutely. Klingons? Nope.
> When I think of intelligent alien life, I think along the lines of Klingons, not alien dolphins. Are we going to find alien dolphins? Absolutely. Klingons? Nope.
Why are you so sure that this is impossible, still? Aside from FTL travel, in what way are humans fundamentally different from Kingons? We both have space travel, some sentience, a taste for weapons, etc.
You think this happened only once in the entire (say) Milky Way, and that there is absolutely 0 chance of it occurring elsewhere? That's certainly possible. But it's not the only possible way things have unfolded.
> Why are you so sure that this is impossible, still? Aside from FTL travel, in what way are humans fundamentally different from Kingons?
You don't understand my argument.
We (and our intelligence) are the unique product of our evolutionary environment. There is no tendency in evolution towards intelligence. There are far many more organisms on this planet in far greater numbers than us that don't even have a brain, nevermind a complex one like ours.
We define intelligence based on traits that we (humans) possess. Some animals possess some of those traits (like dolphins, chimps, etc.), but no animal posses them all, save for us humans, by definition.
For us to find a species that is identical or even just compatible with us psychologically, that species had to evolve in an identical evolutionary environment spanning millions of years. That is so astronomically unlikely that it might as well be impossible.
You may find life that posses some of our traits (like dolphins), but you won't find life that has them all (like Klingons).
Interesting choice of words. So while we're talking in astronomical terms: How big is the universe? How many earth-like planets does it contain? Are there other universes?
Until we can answer at least one of these questions I would refrain from calling anything in this context "astronomically unlikely".
I think that in the whole universe there is intelligent life out there like ours (not in body but in mind/thought). However due to the time/distance scales that are required to interact with them, it might as well not exist, since we'd require a huge amount of luck to ever interact with them.
>There is no tendency in evolution towards intelligence.
What? An obvious ability to learn is found in lots of animals, and in the cases where the benefit outweighs the additional caloric requirements, the evolutionary tendency is towards intelligence. Of course it's not the only one, but it's a pretty big trump card natural selection-wise when it reaches a sufficient level, as humans have clearly demonstrated.
Millions of years are a dime a dozen in the time scales of the universe, and parallelize that across more than trillions of planets. I think your intuition is way off here.
So if some alien spaceship flew up to the planet Earth today, you'd say they aren't intelligent? Just alien dolphins that happen to have built spaceships? What?
I think the point was that some organisms on earth exhibit traits of intelligence, like Dolphins, and that there could be Alien organisms that are like Dolphins that also show signs of intelligence. But just as humans and dolphins on earth cannot live together socially, that intelligence is either too primitive for them to travel to other planets to seek out life alien to them (have you ever seen a Dolphin craft material into a structure that could be used for interplanetary travel?), or is too complex for us to recognize that it is actual intelligence.
Although science fiction has been littered with thousands of stories of alien life visiting us, we humans only know of the fact that humans from Earth are the only organisms looking for life on other planets that we know of. I don't think anyone would doubt that any organism with the capacity to travel to other planets, let alone other solar systems and possibly other galaxies, is un-intelligent. Although we might be biased, we're a pretty intelligent species, as long as the metric is ourselves.
When I think of intelligent alien life, I think along the lines of Klingons, not alien dolphins. Are we going to find alien dolphins? Absolutely. Klingons? Nope.