Odds of intelligent life occuring?

[Anomalocaris]

If you think humans on the whole are susceptible to being inspired towards international peace and goodwill by a discovery that fundamentally alters humans' perception of their place in the universe, then there must be ETs and you must be one yourself.

It's just basic anthropology.  If you were in Iran, you would gravitate towards anyone who was an American, or, for that matter, a Westerner.  Ditto for Earthlings in the Galaxy.  If it could be shown that there were millions of civilizations within the Local Group of galaxies (say, through a unique spectral signature), then, yes, human beings, I believe, would become closer to one another.  Impossible to prove or disprove until such happens, of course.

No, anthropology says if you are in Iran in you would think the American is 5,000 miles away while the alien is 500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away, and the alien hasn't saved me from the wickedness of the great Satan up to now, why should I believe he would make the great Satan less Satanic in the future?

Remember the arrival of the Spanish in America did not relieve the native Americans of their unfortunate tendency to kill each other by the slightest amount until the Spanish and small pox has killed so many native Americans that the native american's zest for fratricide became hampered by the resulting reduction in frequency of encounter between large numbers.

If discovery of alien intelligence led to world peace it would likely because the said alien intelligence in the period after the discovery left too few of us alive to really have another go at each other.

---

We could use a new power source, but we don't need to keep up with the bacteria-like expansion.

Quite agree but this is the flaw of our economic system. It needs to exponentially increase in size in order to function otherwise you end up with recessions or depressions. General economic opinion is that 2% annual growth is best to aim for to compensate for errors in measuring growth.

This happens because  banks need to continually lend money, but they expect it to be paid back with interest. So there is always more debt than money in existence. This is how the money supply grows over time and debt grows even faster. The interest is paid back with future productivity, and if this productivity does not take place because of a lack of growth then the debt gets written off. If this happens too much then you risk bank runs and the collapse of the economic system. Because of fractional reserve banking, banks only have to hold a fraction of the money deposited with them, literally just a few percent. They lend the rest out to be paid back with interest. The system collapses if too many withdraw their money at once.

This has allowed society to expand rapidly, but only works while we're still able to expand. Unfortunately the system won't change until it has to, probably when it collapses.

Particular System of economics would seem to me to be far less intrinsic to technological power arising from biological intelligence than the need to extract energy to do work.