Extraterrestrial intelligence

There are literally millions of pennies, nickels, dimes & quarters just laying around on the ground, in the sand & mud,in playgrounds, on roads. Do you go out & search for them? Have you found any? You don't have time for that kind of nonesense, you say. Much more important things to do......tsk, tsk.

I think they are with us or among us all along except that we just don't realize it. Or, more likely, they do not wanted us to know that they are here on earth for thousands of years because they can learn about us without having to make a direct contact.

Sometimes i wonder if we human beings realise how young a race we are ?
99 odd percent of our current technology has been developed in the last 200 odd year's.

Patience is a virtue that needs to be learned by today's human's especailly those of us who are impatient, that are so anxious about the way we are so divided. The problems and disputes that came with a long long long history in comparision to a human life at its greatest possible extreme, atm, people living beyond 110 years old? Tbh WOW , Most of our ancestors beyond 50 years ago were lucky to get to 50, 50 years before that it was 45 and so on and thats only the western world.
Imagine the amount you can do now, in comparision to a person living 100 years ago with our transport systems, our internet, our whole existence, our diveristy, our range of paths and lifes to follow, healthy,fat,greedy,moneydriven,ecology driven,mining driven etc etc all of you are most than intelligent to realise the implications.
Of course there will be divides human beings are so diverse and are competing for so much that these diverse idea's will clash until a understanding can be reached and then it will clash over another subject which will be sorted, then changed then sorted then has to be sorted with another population as you see day after day after day.
We as a species have an enormous amount to learn and we are expanding what we need to learn every single second of every single day. But we are learning and learning fast and faster everyday, have no fear of that, like everything it takes it's time.

Have patience, but keep your impatience, it's that impatience that will drive the human race to learn faster and faster, how to interact and how to understand each other and as we are so diverse, of course we will clash and clash in the different ways our different culture's with different levels of modernity and different values and different idea's of how to live are going to bring us too.
It's a learning curve, it always has been and tbh, we are so so young in this learning, but yet so advanced, it is scary to even imagine the possiblities of even 50 years down the road.Imagine 2012 years down the world and the capabilites of our race. We will have hiccup's of course, we always have and it comes with the learning, same as school or a persons own learning or any project or research. Have faith in our inherent loneliness to sort or person to person problems eventually, might not happen fast enough for any here, but it will happen, because the want and need is there.

As for alien species, i would be a firm believer in alien species that they may be in contact already i don't know. But the one security i have on this, is that life whether here or anywhere esle in the galaxy will find a way. Life is made to grow.

Why is it assumed that visitors from space haven’t been here just because they are not publicly acknowledged by the ‘powers that be’? I think we may well be the ‘progeny’ of one or more very-advanced-compared-to-us bands of beings, who watch us as an experiment, to see if we can manage to evolve together without killing ourselves off. The thinking is (amongst us odd-balls) that they will share very advanced energy technology with us, but cannot trust us as long as we turn our technology into weapons of war. Face it, the governments of earth are controlled by the elite behind the multi-national corporations, who like things they way they are, so far as energy sources are concerned. Think back to how JP Morgan squelched the ‘free-energy’ research of Nicolai Tesla, who did manage to get credit for alternative current (supported by Westinghouse), while Morgan supported Edison and his direct current.

I can't get enough of articles like this.

Another thing to consider is that our notion of 'intelligence' is not necessarily the 'modus operandi' for biological evolution.
Our cognitive reasoning skills developed from environmental pressures. The great majority of known species don't require these skills to be 'genetically successful'.

By putting emphasis on the search for 'intelligent' life, we're effectively looking for a species that had similar environmental pressures as us, narrowing our scope when we should be broadening it to encompass any unimaginable possibility.

For those interested in other attempts to quantify the likelihood of contacting other intelligent species, the Drake equation is a good place to start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

what if they intentionally dont search for us? Also, theory has a flaw that, there way of communication will mirron human pattern of evolution. It is possible for the other spicies to define evolution is very different way than us -ashok

It's The Prime Directive of course, as will be in place here in the 24th Century, as documented in the Star Trek series.

While we are rapidly destroying the ecosystem in the pursuit of money, our societies are breaking apart and we may be reaching a point of no return if nuclear weapons are used in a future conflict. Extraterrestrials would be smart to give earthlings a wide berth and let them self-destruct before attempting to land. That said instead of worrying about galaxies which we will never know how about fixing our only abode: EARTH

To think that other creatures "should" have contacted us by this time is pure anthropomorphic, parochial chauvinism. At best, we may be under observation. It is doubtful, however, that we're more than a database entry.

The time window in which intelligent aliens with sufficient technology to contact us is probably fairly narrow.

With sufficient computing power, intelligent creatures are likely to have merged with their own artificial intelligences within a few centuries of having discovered electricity. At this point, resource problems are probably negligible and poverty, jealousy and all the other characteristics of naturally evolved creatures have probably lost all meaning to those awarenesses that remain, assuming persistent existence itself, is still of interest to them.

Those who hypothesize about intelligent life elsewhere always do so in apparent ignorance of the development of "intelligent" life here. The probability we would evolve was astronomically small and was dependent upon many highly unlikely events happening just so. E.g., this planet "should" be dominated by dinosaurs but is not, only because of a specific asteroid striking just when it did, in the way it did. What were the odds of that?

Can we get beyond the Calvin quotes you cynical people?

What if other lifeforms exist, and they have not contacted because of the disaster we have created of the ecology of this planet? Money, social status, power and greed seem to override the well being of this planet run by humans.

It is highly probable that life on Earth has occurred only once, some 3.7 billion years ago, from a single primordial organism that came into existence with the capabilities of creating copies of itself. We do not know how probable this chance occurrence might be. But we can guess, based on the fact that in those billions of years it seems it did not happen again. And we are talking of a planet with all the right boxes ticked. So chances may be astronomically slim, no matter how many trillion planets are there with similar characteristics to our own. And then it took a sizeable portion of the age of the observable universe (with is only 13.7 bn years old) to produce a species with the right technological prowess to probe the stars. The fact that we are the products of such an extraordinary event creates the illusion that somehow life is a natural and almost inevitable outcome when conditions are right. We may well be alone in the universe, which in itself is an awe-inspiring notion.

A lot of people point correctly to the difference between the likelihood of life existing elsewhere and the likelihood of that life giving rise to technological civilisations.

It is generally believed that life is widespread in the Universe, some go as far as saying that life will emerge inevitably if the conditions are right. Of course we have as yet no way of knowing this for sure but a single discovery of independent lifeforms (e.g. on Titan) would boost this theory considerably.

On the other hand, most people believe the changes of life giving rise to technology to be extremely small. Obviously, some places that may harbour life are not conducive to intelligence. Any life on Titan would have a very hard time developing higher life forms. But there are plenty of other places where the circumstances would be much more favourable.

One way to look at this is to think in terms of energy utilisation (as opposed to energy efficiency). Animals are much better at utilising energy than plants are, but have a much lover energy efficiency. Predators have an even higher level of energy utilisation while their energy efficiency falls even further. Sexual procreation is vastly inefficient energy-wise but a very powerful evolutionary development that utilises energy to further the survival of the species.

A major trigger for the growth in energy utilisation is the presence of oxygen. From the time when the first plants began to produce oxygen to the point where the atmosphere was saturated took several hundres of millions of years. All surface rock had to oxygenize first, the vast oceanic depths had to be saturated but once that was finished animals started to develop, using breathing and eating as a way of utilising much more energy at the cost of energy efficiency.

One might assume that evolution will lead to increases in energy utilisation where possible, that certainly seems to be the case on our planet. The rise of warm-blooded and placental animals are fairly recent examples. Both give a much higher energy utilisation even at the cost of energy efficiency and are necessary for even further developments in energy utilisation, such as larger brains, technology and social cohesion.

Our vast brain founds the basis of our technological development and our civilisation. But developments in brain size came first and are most likely driven by increasing social needs. Many species, most of them closely related to us, have a well-developed social structure and again this may be seen as a better utilisation of energy at the cost of energy efficiency (time spent grooming is energy wasted - unless grooming gives survival benefits that justify the costs).

Our own species seems to have developed with technology in the form of basic tool-making long before we developed our current brain size. Tool making is another example of increased energy utilisation and can be seen with many species. A mixture of tool-making and strong social cohesion, when faced with fluctuating climatic changes during the last 3 million years, led to the rise of several species with increasing brain size and tool making abilities. One of these species eventually came out on top and eradicated the others. That it was us and not one of our close but extinct cousins is probably pure coincidence.

We humans have a unique habitat compared with other species, a habitat defined by technology on the one hand and other humans on the other. It may well be that a given planet only has room for one such species, or maybe not. My point here is that the rise of a technological species, although far from certain, is not as unlikely as many seem to think.

The odds are in favor but lets examine the possible scenarios.

1) we are alone
2) we aren't alone but we are too far away
3) we aren't alone but are the most advanced
4) we aren't alone but no one has the technology to communicate
5) we weren't alone but now are b/c of war, natural disaster
6) We aren't alone but others don't know we are here
7) We aren't alone but others intentionally choose not to contact us

Personally i think two, four or six are the most likely

What makes you so sure our science has it right?
Just because we can explain some phenomena with it doesn't mean there isn't a completely different model that does the same thing.
Why should the speed of light be any kind of restraint?
We can't even prove that is right except for minute particles using the model we have.
We haven't mastered gravity. We don't have the only feasible type of energy - fusion. Heck - we're not even working very hard at it!!
I'm pretty sure any advanced civilization is not constrained by distance or the speed of anything.
Be that said, one of the best explanations I read of our being here was in a sc-fi book (I forget the name).
It postulated that in time gone by before Apple and Jobs , an alien spacecraft conducting a survey in this part of the galaxy, whilst departing Earth, flushed its garbage into the sea. Well - you know the rest - first there were swimming creatures, then crawling creatures, then Shopping Malls, etc.

Sure. Like some alien culture would REALLY want to contact a homicidal race of creatures who entertain themselves by either constantly murdering one another OR by watching movies about slaughtering alien INVADERS.
If anything, I think an advanced culture would probably post DETOUR SIGNS on the outer edges of our solar system, advising space travelers to steer clear of our planet !

What if the Aliens are approximately as advanced as we are? Since the whole Universe started at the same point in time, sentient beings may only be able to develop at a uniform speed, because of the kind of early Universal cataclisms that would have wiped out any earlier evolutionary attempts at complex life (viz asteroids and large reptiles on Earth). In which case we are seperated by a currently unbridgable common technological gap.

I subscribe to the theory that the proof of the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe is that they haven't bothered to contact us!

One thing many ignore when calculating the probabilities of alien CIVILISATION, is that they confuse civilisation with life. It is very simple just to look at our own planet which has proved itself to be suitable for life. The earth has sustained life, in one way or another, for more than a billion years, but as far as we know (and we know quite well) only one life-form, mankind, has succeeded to reach such a high degree of intelligence to create what we call a civilisation. And mankind has started to develop its modern civilisation only about 10.000 years ago. So, the probability of having civilisation on planet earth, if you were an alien looking for civilisation on earth throughout time, would have been 10.000 to 1 billion, and that is a probability of 0.001%. It seems to me that the likelihood of finding life in other planets is probable but finding civilisation might just be so rare it could not even occur in many galaxies with billions of stars and planets. Unless God is involved in all this and he made other galaxies because he wanted to improve his skills before making his unique and special creation, the mankind.