How advanced do you think extraterrestrial life would have to be to be considered "intelligent life"? Obviously the equivalent of humans would be considered intelligent life. The equivalent of amoebas would NOT be intelligent life. How about the equivalent of dogs? Would that be considered intelligent life?

I assume that intelligent life would have to be cognizant to the point that it could override its instinctual impulses to make controlled independent decisions. But how would we know if a life form's decisions were independent of its instinctual programming if we didn't know anything about the biological tradition in which it evolved?

It's a good question, and not an easy one to answer. Science has enough problems just clasifying life, let alone intelligence. Personally I don't think we have enough data yet.

Any life form capable of decision making is intelligent.

Some life forms are more intelligent then others and some less than. The real question is, is there a life form with a substantially higher intellect then our own?

Something we shouldn't forget is that, in the long run, intelligence isn't all that important. True, it is crucial for us, but look where it's gotten us. Polluting the only home we've got and valuing profit over life.
We always rush to change the world. But take dinosaurs: they had to adapt and find a place in it. Their long existence suggests that they did something right.

I don't think it's important how intelligent extraterrestrial life is, just as long as it exists.

I beg to differ. In the short term, perhaps intelligence is not important, but if a species is going to survive in the long term (millions of years) intelligence plays a much more crucial role. The dinosaurs (some species of dinos) survived as long as they did, because the environment was astonishingly benign. They didn't have to adapt, they did so to fill all available evolutionary niche - because there was little in the way of competition. As soon as the evironment turned nasty, they could not cope, and died out.

It was Clarke that said "when we find alien life we will find monkeys or angels, but not men."

The history of our species has been a miniscule fraction of the time life has existed on Earth. Life more complex than sponges and couple millimeter long worms has only existed for five hundred million years out of almost four billion years of existence. Our species has existed for something on the order of a hundred thousand years, agriculture has only existed for a little over ten thousand years, and all the INTERESTING history has been in the last 5,000 years or so. Look at the last few centuries, and things just TAKE OFF. That's kind of an artifact of better records, and previous eras also had interesting happenings, but you have to admit that the more recent times have had things kind of taking off. The question is if such a rate of change can be sustained, and if its results can be sustained.

There is also the question of what you mean by advanced. The way science has proceeded here is not necessarily the same way it could proceed everywhere. Somebody could get a good knowledge of chemistry without ever caring about astronomy. Or vice versa. They could use entirely different models for quantum mechanics or other such things that nonetheless produce the same practical results as we have, and understand things differently.

As for anybody that we'll FIND - the sheer DISTANCES and deep time present in the universe make it very difficult to find anyone. When I use reasonable values for the Drake equation i get a figure of only about 3 civilizations in our galaxy, assuming they last a few tens of thousands of years. The distances will be immense, and even if someone were to occupy multiple star systems the constraints of physics as we know it mean that pretty much everybody is restricted to planets and star systems, and radio is actually a TERRIBLE medium for communicating between stars, directional lasers are much better and they CAN'T be intercepted. The only way we will see these people is if they direct a directional radio signal or laser in OUR direction - we have done very few of these and I see little reason that anyone would conduct an organized attempt to do so. Finding people will be VERY hard and I see little economic or practical reason for anyone to expand radically. But I honestly can't predict what an entire other RACE will do or even what we will do assuming we survive for millions of years. I suspect that ultimately once it appears and creates technology intelligence has a TENDENCY but not a CERTAINTY to survive.

So far, our intelligence hasn't given us a way to stop the rapid extinction of plant and animal species going on right now. Or rather, our intelligence prevents us from doing anything about it.
I'll agree that a very few species of dinosaurs survived for extended periods out of sheer luck, but just look at us: if it hadn't been for the last ice age drying up Africa and forcing us to leave the trees, and then conveniently ending after we had spread across the globe to allow for agriculture, we wouldn't be here right now, or at least, not in this form. I'd say we owe quite a lot to sheer dumb luck.
But precisely because of their longevity, dinosaurs were exposed to extremely disastrous events that sometimes threatened their existence. If the Permian extinction had lasted just a bit longer, they wouldn't have ever come into being. There was a large comet that hit the earth at the end of the Triassic that triggered a fairly large extinction. Dinosaurs had to adapt quickly to survive, otherwise they would have died out.
Humans often make the mistake of thinking that we are the final result of a long process designed to produce intelligent life, when in fact we are merely a small part of a vast and complex system that's working just like it always has been to adapt to new situations. Who knows, maybe we won't make the cut next time around; maybe our entire legacy will be reduced to a few American flags and bits of landing gear left on the Moon.

I think it's our egocentricity that keeps us from doing anything about it. We aren't willing to sacrifice our personal enjoyments. I think it's possible that intelligence could exist without ego.

On the other hand, maybe succeeding in a "survival of the fittest" world, makes it impossible for intelligent life to develop without the drive to compete and win developing simultaneously.

I'd say anything that is equal or greater than the human race in intelligence could be considered intelligent.

Its ability to associate cause and effect perhaps.

Self aware 'things' would constitute as intelligent to me.

I would class intelligence as knowledge the more you have the more you become aware and then the rest of whatever the subject is you are reading is left for your ideas and imagination to decide the next path..

With regards to Alien intelligence i would say that they are more advanced because they are aware of more i.e. their knowledge is much more profound and ahead of ours..

For example for a lot of us the theory of time travel has still not been practiced for all we know yet Alien forms are alleged to be able to do so.. Why ? well my theory is as before they have the knowledge and method of being able to do so thus making them more advanced than us..

I could go on but through fear of boring you i won't LOL ..

Thats what i think anyway..

But most likely, because of our intelligence and tool-making capabilities, humanity will survive the Sixth Mass Extinction.



That goes without saying, although I would dispute the "leave the trees" comment - our ancestors left the trees into the savannahs before the Pleistocene (3 million years ago), which is when we started seeing the Ice Age cycle kick in again because of the low temperatures (most of our planet's history, the cycles that create Ice Ages simply did nothing, because the planet was so warm that there was little or no ice anyways).



One thing to distinguish this from humanity is that while Dinosaurs continued to survive over the Mesozoic, most particular species of dinosaurs did not. What humanity has got going for it is that our tool-making gives us the ability to achieve "species immortality".



I think we will. We've survived worse - there was a very nasty bottleneck in our species (meaning an event that kills off most members and narrows the group down to a less genetically diverse group) something like 150,000 years ago, and we survived with nothing more than good stone tools and the ability to make fire. Hell, we survived the deeply unpleasant Younger Dryas event 10,000 years ago with the same stuff, and that was the equivalent of dropping into an Ice Age for 2 centuries.

If alien life was not a carbon based life form we might not even be able to recognize it. It is also true that just because we are unable to communicate with even other carbon based life forms that intelligence is solely the domain of humans. Who knows maybe we are the amoeba in their view?









http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/n...ie_intelligence

There is no such thing as "species immortality." It is not possible for a single species to remain unchanged for millions of years in a constantly changing environment. Hominids have been around perhaps five million years, but culturally modern humans have only been around about 90,000. Several other hominids had the ability to make tools, and yet all of them are now extinct. There's no reason to think we'll be any different.


It's not that difficult to survive a major disaster. There have been asteroid impacts that left craters miles wide that didn't wipe out any species. All you need is an area still capable of supporting you--something we're likely to run out of by the time we really need it.
I don't believe that humans as a species will survive indefinitely. If we're lucky, however, we'll adapt into something more suited for a new environment, and perhaps something not so prone to destroying its only home.

Why not? We can build tools so complex that they make the primitive stone tools of earlier hominids look like so much worthless rock. Unlike earlier hominids, we can actually change and re-structure our environment and grow food directly on it, whereas they were limited to the use of fire and hunting to manage their environments. Our technology and capabilities are so advanced that theoretically we could achieve species immortality simply by planting several self-sufficient colonies in space and on Mars and the like, so that if something were to happen on Earth than at least some outposts of humanity would continue.

As for species immortality, well, obviously genetic changes continue to occur. However, you have to admit that the selection pressure is far, far weaker, since the environment does a much less effective job of culling a weaker and/or unlucky human than it did tens of thousands of years ago.



That's hardly a major disaster. Now, the KT impact at the end of the Cretaceous, that was a major disaster.



We haven't ruined Earth yet, and I doubt we will (in terms of utterly destroying the biosphere) - humanity will probably survive the worst of what is generally expected to come, albeit with enormous human suffering. The race will go on, even if many particular human beings die from the transition.

What can i say?

We have ignored and brutalised (as a race) dolphins and cetaceans who are believed to be sentient.... they just dont share the same "drives" as we do so they can be killed with impunity. I dare say the same would happen with any intelligent species that arrives here, unless they have big guns!! If they arrive without weapons I daresay we (the human race - or rather , our pathetic "leaders" ) would destroy them to maintain their own power privileges.

We do it to ourselves, we de-humanise Islam, Communism, etc because it makes killing all the more easy. We make killing, slaughter and genocide acceptable because the victims are de-humanised, taken away from that plateau of cogniscence and intelligence. We end up killing for the sport and "because we can"!!!

Am i wrong???

perhaps they are on a higher spiritually based level than us. this statement has little to do with religion