Quote Originally Posted by bigspenda73
wuf, how likely is it that we are not the only beings of higher intelligence in existence?
Extremely likely

It's hard to say exactly, but I would guess that human-like advanced life exists in the thousands (maybe 5 or 6 figures even). However, due to physics, we can never actually know this, unfortunately. I'd say the universe has billions of different extra-terrestrial life strands, though.

I don't think that life is that rare of a commodity; we may even have several strands of life in our own solar system on places like Mars, Europa, asteroids or other such places that could allow for extremophile life. I'm unsure exactly, but I think that even Earth may have had at least two different abiogenesis events: one that got energy from the sun, and one that got energy from geothermal vents on the ocean bed. Don't quote me on Earth's abiogensis hypotheses, though, cuz I haven't looked too much into it. As far as we know, where ever there is energy, water, and a relatively steady environment, there should be life.

But there's a huge difference between just life and advanced life. This is kind of obvious, but I think that the difference is even bigger than most would suggest. This is because looking through our history suggests that there are many very specific factors that have allowed intelligence to thrive. Things like mass extinction events which kill off the dumb dominant species while allowing the rise of a potentially more intelligent based species. This is what happened with the dinosaurs. Had they never been wiped out, mammals would still be tiny little creatures that live underground.

Or something like the collision between Earth and Moon. I'm not sure how long ago it was, let's just say 4 billion years, two approximately equal sized planets collided with each other, and millions of years later what was left was the Earth and the Moon. This may not sound like much, but it's actually super important for life for several reasons. The main is that the collision was in such a way that one planet retained more gravity than the other, and thus retained more of the hard metals brought by both planets resulting in a higher percentage of dense matter than the Earth previously had. This change in ratio of dense matter is what allows the Earth to have a very active core and a strong magnetic field which allows it to keep its atmosphere. If Earth had never collided with the Moon then Earth's density would be similar to Mars' and would similarly have been stripped of atmosphere by solar winds a long time ago.

There are many other factors too. Things like amount of landmass and continental drift being just right so that there's not too much volcanic activity, not too much or too little ice on the poles, and even something like Jared Diamonds theory about geography playing the primary role in the development of technology due to agriculture, livestock, and war resulting from specific proximity like what we had in Eurasia but not any other continent. I also think this implicates things like what could have come of the Third Reich. If the Americas were not equally as advanced as Europe and not isolated by thousands of miles of water, I think it is pretty likely that some kind of totalitarian government would reign supreme over humankind and quench out science.

But what could possibly be the most difficult aspect of human type life, is the development of 'morality'. Some recent studies on chimps have suggested that they don't understand the concept of 'better or worse'. IOW, they showed a chimp how to do something, then it would do it, but then they showed the same chimp a more efficient way to do that same something, and the chimp didn't do it. The conclusions of the studies suggest that somewhere, somehow human ancestry began looking at things in a hierarchy of efficiency, and I personally think that this strongly implicates our obsession with mores and doing things 'right, wrong, better, worse, etc', yet we have no clue how we evolved like this.

All in all, I suspect that other life in the universe is very similar to Earth life. We like to think that life is unique, and Earth is unique, but I suspect that life and Earth are just like every other thing in the universe i.e. aspects of physical and chemical laws, and that it plays itself out in innumerable quantities.

Star Trek had it right. Advanced life throughout the universe is going to be a lot like us. They're going to be bipedal, opposable thumbs (with musculature that depends on intricacies instead of brute strengths), capable of language, long gestation, etc. Without these things life would simply not be able to advance to homo sapiens level.

On a different note, we could be hit by a gamma ray burst tomorrow and melt instantaneously.

Also, super advanced life is probably not even biological anymore. Our understanding of technology strongly suggests that homo sapiens will someday be replaced by mechanical AI. For some time we will hybridize ourselves and be cyborgs, but biological life is ultimately inferior or mechanical life, and the technological singularity will throw us under the bus. Super advanced intelligence may even be something ridiculous like on the nano-scale