A fascinatingly disturbing thought

[qube_TA]

shakotan said:

qube_TA said:

Given how rare life seems to be and particularly how rare life that can fly from one planet to a moon is or send probes out over its Solar System, I can't imaging any ET not finding that at least curious.

This is the entire point he's making. To US, life appears rare because we haven't found it anywhere else than the microscopic amount of the Universe that we've searched thus far. To another intellegence, 1% greater than us, life could appear abundant in millions of different planets across THEIR known Universe.

The fact we can send machines to the moon and out across such a small and insignificant area as a single Solar System could appear as mundane to that other race as to the ability to put one foot in front of the other without falling over.

No I understood his point, he made it quite clear. My point is that if there was an abundance of +1%'s out there or better whether in a colony of systems or not, then even dumb schmucks like ourselves would still be sufficiently intelligent to spot this. But the fact that evidence points to the notion that species that could do what we can is properly rare and therefore would always be of interest to another species whether it was much more intelligent or not.

[shakotan]

qube_TA said:

shakotan said:

qube_TA said:

Given how rare life seems to be and particularly how rare life that can fly from one planet to a moon is or send probes out over its Solar System, I can't imaging any ET not finding that at least curious.

This is the entire point he's making. To US, life appears rare because we haven't found it anywhere else than the microscopic amount of the Universe that we've searched thus far. To another intellegence, 1% greater than us, life could appear abundant in millions of different planets across THEIR known Universe.

The fact we can send machines to the moon and out across such a small and insignificant area as a single Solar System could appear as mundane to that other race as to the ability to put one foot in front of the other without falling over.

No I understood his point, he made it quite clear. My point is that if there was an abundance of +1%'s out there or better whether in a colony of systems or not, then even dumb schmucks like ourselves would still be sufficiently intelligent to spot this. But the fact that evidence points to the notion that species that could do what we can is properly rare and therefore would always be of interest to another species whether it was much more intelligent or not.

You're making the mistake of rationalising the significance of the human race from the human race's perspective, and not the perspective of the outside observer.

They could have made a cursory look over us some time in the past [before we had methods of being able to detect them] and made the decision that we were not worthy of any further observation.

[qube_TA]

I wouldn't call it a mistake.

if our '1%' was trivial to the point that other lifeforms would regard us a but monkeys (or earthworms for that matter) and not be interested in us at all then the cosmos would have to be full of life of varying degrees of intelligence and for us to be at the bottom end of the scale. Given the size of the universe and the abundance of organic chemicals that are scattered everywhere this is entirely plausible.

However, despite our mongdom there should still be enough evidence of this other life for us to detect, nothing spotted.

We're curious about all life on this planet (and elsewhere), not just the clever ones.

So whilst I agree that our 1% is probably not that special in the grand scheme of things, I would still argue that due to the lack of evidence for anything else we'd be certainly a curiosity at least so I wouldn't dismiss our species just yet.

[qube_TA]

You need to go from organic chemicals, to proteins, to RNA, to DNA, to a cell, to multicellular, to complex life and then for one or more threads of evolution to create an animal with sufficient brain power with a suitably dexterous body to make stuff and figure things out.

Then that lifeform needs to discover science and engineering and to not blow itself up or be wiped out by something along the way.

Because nature/evolution doesn't 'need' to do any of these things it's fairly certain that life much beyond the primitive is fairly uncommon.

If early man had not survived to establish the species then the world would be pretty much as it is now, with the same diversity of life on it but without an animal who was intelligent enough to do anything other than the basics.