+1

your logic if faulty, by your standart the great masters of the universe are plants (specially common weed/grass) and fungus. They take over and adapt to whatever environment,sometimes even transforming it to their liking.

I know that memory is flawed. There's a reason eyewitness accounts aren't entirely accurate in a court of law. The more we research memory, the more we're discovering how malleable they are. The most reliable way for any advanced civilization to record their knowledge and share it with future generations is through writing it down and storing it in a fashion that is easy to retrieve and understand.

Does this mean that man 50,000 years ago was pretty stupid because we didn't record our past?

Nah, because even then we were creating cave paintings.

See, tens of thousands of years ago, man was still exhibiting intelligent behavior, for 20,000 to 40,000 years ago, man figured out how to convert wolves to dogs. Are whales doing the same? Where are their biological experiments? Where is the evidence they are altering their environment to their advantage? Though they may be large, they aren't without predators. Just because they can swim around the seas doesn't mean that's all they need. Intelligent species aren't simply content, they want more. They want to make things easier and to shore up the future for generations.

Man, while possessing some unique physical advantages such as sweating and bipedal locomotion--the former which helps us chase prey until they overheat, the latter which helps us observe our prey with our eyes in a fashion that leaves most of us hidden, are actually quite physically unprepared for our planet. We have no fur, thus we get cold or freeze in the higher latitudes, we run quite slow compared to other mammals, and our hands lack claws as well as the rest of our bodies lack natural weapons to harm our prey and other creatures--compared with the most successful of predators such as lion teeth or bear claws or snake venom, or ram or rhinoceros horns or stegasaurus tails, etc. We were forced through these genetic disadvantages to use our minds even harder, so the argument could be made that because of our weaknesses we've come so far, but I posit that this is not so, for even around 12,000 BC, around the advent of agriculture, man had already developed the tools and means needed to live safely--no, like kings among much of the animal kingdom. For all intents and purposes we were the same as elephants and whales. Yet still, our appetite for discovery continued and we've gone from living in adobe huts, crapping in holes in the floor to evacuating our waste matter out of our space suits as we explore the moon.

We didn't have to go to the moon, nor did we have to send probes to the outer planets. We could have remained content to stay on this Earth. But we haven't. Our curiosity is boundless, and for true intelligence to be measured, I think we must look at the aptitude for curiosity any species has, their compulsion to act on it, and the lengths they'll go.

Blade, not true.

Adaptability is not a measure of intelligence in and of itself. Spores are hardy and so yes, some plants and animals can survive in a variety of environments. I addressed this - the only species to survive the long haul of history are simple organisms; in order to beat the odds for complex creatures, useful intelligence is required.

We're talking intelligence.

I believe we will find - if we go enough places outside of Earth - that life itself that we can recognize isn't going to be that difficult to discover. Life came to Earth shockingly early, after all. However, I'm not ready to get all excited and shout "WE ARE NOT ALONE!" when a simple bacteria is found under the ice of Europa.

Scientists are pretty sure homo sapiens went through a near extinction event, and because of intelligence were able to overcome this and spread to every corner of the globe. Even drastic climate change can't kill us.

As to the claim that writing is new, it isn't. People have been writing through pictographs, drawings, and other decorations pretty much since the species evolved. When they weren't carving on stones, they were scarring and tatooing themselves. Tally marks (used for counting) have been found dating to the Neolithic, going back 35,000 years. Math, it would seem, evolved nearly as quickly as language.

Whales don't need math, as they perform no trade. They perform no trade because they are not in control of their resources. A beaver may build a dam on an existing stream, but it can't move the stream to where it wants it to be (to jump ahead of the discussion).

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I'm glad you mentioned this - it's the one evolutionary advantage that put us above all of our prey on the plains of Africa.

There is no consensus still on what pictography means, dreams, story tales or recount of the world around it.

writing is recent 3400 and 3300 BC for sumerians 300 BC for americas, homo sapiens or even modern human have been on earth for how long ?100.000 years at least.....so very very recent. even proto writing is not more recent than that.

I have to point out that gravity exists all over this planet; being inside an ocean does not negate gravity.

Out in space two alien life forms are speaking with each other.

The first alien says, "The dominant life forms on the earth planet have developed satellite-based nuclear weapons." The second alien, who looks exactly like the first, asks, "Are they an emerging intelligence?" The first alien says, "I don't think so, they have them aimed at themselves."

Buoyancy can and does - and on Earth being inside an ocean is by far the most common way any living things experience buoyancy...

lol

Exactly.

That is not zero G. You still have contact forces, and buoyancy is not the same as gravity.

Whales have it made - until they encounter a Japanese research vessel.

and they are not smart enough to escape

Aye, and if they were so bright, they would have come up with a way to fight back against all the whalers.

They have sunk some of them. Essex is a known loss.

Those damned whales, packing quite the resistance. Perhaps we should churn the seas full of liquid crisco, asap, as to sink their buoyant humors to the coral marshes?

Depraved blubberates.

Drown them out, I say. The world of air belongs to us and us alone!

"Counteract" is probably a better word than "negate" here. Consider being in orbit - people often say "There's zero gravity in space". That is of course technically never true even in deep space, but in low Earth orbit you are still subject to very nearly the same Earth gravity as someone on the ground - it's just being counteracted by being in orbit and thus providing a zero G environment. But from the point of view from anywhere else in space you are still gravitationally bound to the Earth just as much as people on the ground.

But there's no science needed to get that "floating" around underwater MUCH more closely resembles a zero G environment than being on land...

OK... if they are "intelligent", but it is so unrelatable to us... it begs the question. Why should we care all that much?

If extraterrestrial intelligent life forms show up in ships that travel near the speed of light, possibly with weapons that can wreak destruction beyond our current capacity... that is technology that we could be interested in, and or very scared of. Whales or dolphins telling us about their oceanic existence really doesn't have quite the same zing.

Considering all the radio frequency emissions we have sent out, I'd say it is prudent to keep listening to see if we have gained the interest of someone out there who may not have good intentions toward us. I think the probability of that E.T.I. is lower than many seem to wish for, but the potential cost of being wrong about it warrants keeping our ears and eyes open.

I imagine seeing all those lights on at night would be a pretty significant visual clue. If they can detect Radio Frequencies, they certainly would have to conclude there was intelligence down here... ( at least until they figure out how to decode and interpret those transmissions, anyways... )

I imagine that any ET capable of traversing space between one star to another either through luminal, superluminal or intradimensional travel via folding/tunneling/shifting, that wanted to kill us, could, and there wouldn't be anything we could do about that.

Think about it--we're type 0 on the Kardashev scale. Any star faring civilization that visits us will be a type 2+. Star Trek and Star Wars are type 2.x, whereas a "god" would be type 4. To us, a lowly type 0, we'd perceive a type 2 as gods, given their exponential degrees of progress beyond us. If they want us dead, we're dead, so no amount of preparation could save us, short of ourselves surviving long enough to progress to type 1 and beyond.



I don't think we need to be worried about whales--they can't even build a bubble fire or manufacture their own "air suits."

It's very possible any sufficiently advanced civilization has moved past radio frequencies. We've only been broadcasting for a hundred years or so--so even if we're transmitting, they might not even be listening because RF is quite primitive.