(September 30, 2011 at 8:17 pm)Zen Badger Wrote: As to whether it would be what we consider "intelligent" life(and I have my doubts as to it arising on Earth). Different story, since the entire 3.5 billion year history of life on Earth has produced just one species out of all the millions that have existed that has created a technological civilization I would suspect it will be very rare.
That's why I qualified it with "humanlike" intelligence - because otherewise, we could consider other primates, like chimps, to be intelligent life forms - they are, after all, capable of emoting, language, society, and so forth. Dolphins and certain other animals are also individually capable of this (as opposed to creatures like ants and bees, which also have many of the above traits, but only when you consider the whole society and not each of them, individually.)
You also need to conisder that our kind of intelligence, while rare and required 4.5 billion years of time (starting from the formation of the planet capable of sustaining us) that if you consider that amount of time average, then the universe has had about three times that length of time necessary for intelligence to arrive - especially if you consider our the length of that time to be average and also considering the extinction events that could have allowed technological humanlike intelligence to develop sooner.
For example, if the cretacious event happened 10 million years later (55 million years ago instead of 65 million years ago) and thus allowing a kind of intelligent dinosaur to develop the ability to avert the distaster) or with conidtions that allow for fewer extinction events.
Many of these things, plus when you consider the enormous expanse of time since the big bang and the formation of the first second-generation and third-generation star systems (which would have the chemicals necessary) can point to life having been around for well over 10 of the 13.7 billion years of the universe's current lifespan.
That gives plenty of time between now and the degenerate age of the universe for intelligent life to arise as well as plenty of environments that could potentially be suitable for it.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
