Fox wrote:
I just say now: It is highly arrogant to think that we are the oldest race with the highest technology. If you look at the space as its whole, you'll see that the space is old enough to have races which have higher technologies then we do.
It has nothing to do with arrogance. It has to do with rational conclusions.
Considering the fact that, in a natural history of several billion years, in which we can talk about 250 million years of existence of "more complex" life on our own planet, 'man' exists for not more than 1.8 million years, shows how rarely the rise of 'highly intelligent creatures' occurs. The problem in it is, that our genus paid an enormous price for being intelligent: we need to eat what's rich on proteines (hence, meat, which is dangerous to get) and we have one of the highest death rates at women by giving birth, as pregnancy seriously weakens the mother due to the development of brain tissue of her offspring. Today it isn't much of an issue for us, as we ourselves created secure environments and medical support that assures almost everyones survival - but we had to get to this point, and that required a lot of luck and excellent conditions allowing such a development.
Of course: we can't say we're the only ones. Actually, we're the evidence that such an evolutionary step is possible. But you've to keep in mind that earth itself is already something pretty unique, due to the following features:
- it has the possibility to host advanced life, which is nowhere else the case in our own solar system (hence, an atmosphere allowing efficient metabolisms to work).
- it protects its inhabitants from UV-Radiation (which is deadly for any monocellular life, and disallowed the development of advanced organisms on earth for most of the planet's lifetime)
It took billions of years until earth's life was able to survive on the planet's surface, due to simple physical conditions disallowing that, and it's VERY unlikely that other life-hosting planets had or still have it any better.
Now, it's one thing to think of an equally intelligent creature. But an intelligent creature with a better technology (hence, stuff like traveling from solar system A to solar system B and leaving signs on a farmer's field)? Personally, I think that's a pretty ridicolous thought. For two reasons:
- Humans never "invented" a technology. We copy mechanisms that have been developed in nature. Other intelligent creatures would mostlikely do the same, and get to pretty similar results.
- We both, humans and foreign creatures, are, additionally to our metabolic dependencies, bound to the same physical limits: we've to transform energy (energy can NEVER be created), we've to invest a lot in overcoming gravitation, we've to protect ourselves against radiation, we've to protect us against collisions with any other matter in space, we surely can't accelerate ourselves to lightspeed, and so on...
...so - in short: even IF such a creature exists, and that indeed might be the truth, it's absolutely irrational to assume that it might have been on our planet already, or that we'll find it - since - we're literally bound to our own solar systems.
