What would alien life look like?

[AFTT47]

A major question mark is intelligent life. Our planet is about 4.5 billion years old but only in the last few million years or so did evolution favor big brains. The dinosaurs did fine for a 100 million years+ without it until that damn asteroid hit about 65 million years ago.

Current understanding is that extra-terrestrial life is probably very common but intelligent life may be rare.

We just don't know yet.

On the other hand, lineages of non-intelligent extra-terresterial life would likely rarely cross interplanetary divide and perhaps hardly ever cross interstellar divide even when looking at sample pools spanning multiple galaxies.   But intelligent alien life may develop interstellar travel capability with significant frequency and thus spread across interplanetary and interstellar divide quite often.

So I suspect that while nonintelligence alien lineages may be very numerous and be everywhere, Intelligent alien lineages, although may be very few, but still can also everywhere.

We just simply don't know. I personally believe it is likely (based on our current understanding) there is some species somewhere that has evolved to a god-like level. Given the age and expanse of the universe, it seems inevitable. My argument is that I don't believe we are capable of comprehending what such a species would do or want to do. How could we? An ant could not possibly comprehend you or I but the laws of physics imply the existence of beings as far beyond us as we are beyond the ants.