Re: ALIENS would be dumb! Stupid! Primitive!

On 11/30/25 2:07 PM, Mitchell Holman wrote:

>     In a universe 14 billion years old
> Earth has only had intelligent life
> for smallest sliver of time, less than
> half a million years.

We can't gauge the intelligence of humans living a million
years ago. That would require us to be able to distinguish
between a lack of knowledge and a lack of intellectual
capacity.

Humans go back millions of years, and we've been producing
tools at that time. We rightly expect a slow march of
progress and not a great leap from nothing to architecture.
They were certainly "Intelligent Enough" to not only survive
but survive for a lot longer than us so called "Moderns"
have.

> We are latecomers.

Humans are millions of years old.

I don't buy into the splitting everything into THIS genus and
THAT genus, much less all the different species. There's a
good argument to be made that we are the exact same species
as erectus, Neanderthals... Denisovans... a whole bunch of
others. Mostly because interbreeding took place and that is
the best test of "Same Species" in existence. It's not a
perfect test, but it is the best test.

> There are smarter species out there,

That's not only speculation but frivolous. If we do find
another species, the odds say it's roughly our level or
behind us... more likely behind us.

The problem here is that if we do find them, all we'll know
is that there planet hosts life. We'd detect the biosignatures
of all the life in their atmosphere. If they have reached a
point of industrialization, we may be able to detect
Technosignatures as well. But actually seeing them? Communicating?
Super duper unlikely to ever happen.

> but
> it is proof of our arrogance that we
> think they would bother trying to visit
> or even talk to us.

Communications would be out of the question. We would be unable
to communicate with them and in all likelihood they would be
even less advanced, technically, than we are. So communication
wouldn't happen.



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