Considering that there are billions upon billions of planets, I think life on other planets is very likely, although it could be in a vastly different form than here on earth. I very much like the idea that reba put forth up above, that if ET life were to visit us, that would mean they are very old and have figured out how to get along.
Here's an excerpt from Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival which asks a very interesting question. Is it better to be smart or dumb? Higher intelligence may just be an evolutionary statistical outlier (but again, billions and billions of planets would mean an improbability could become a certainty).
"A few years ago, one of the great figures of contemporary biology, Ernst Mayr, published some reflections on the likelihood of success in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He considered the prospects very low. His reasoning had to do with the adaptive value of what we call "higher intelligence," meaning the particular human form of intellectual organization. Mayr estimated the number of species since the origin of life at about fifty billion, only one of which "achieved the kind of intelligence needed to establish a civilization." It did so very recently, perhaps 100,000 years ago. It is generally assumed that only one small breeding group survived, of which we are all descendants.
Mayr speculated that the human form of intellectual organization may not be favored by selection. The history of life on Earth, he wrote, refutes the claim that "it is better to be smart than to be stupid," at least judging by biological success: beetles and bacteria, for example, are vastly more successful than humans in terms of survival. He also made the rather somber observation that "the average life expectancy of a species is about 100,000 years."
by
jhufford on
07/09/2010 12:58:41 PM EST
