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Originally Posted by xelasnave
Probably no one has ever thought about this question so I ask it now
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I assume you were not serious about this statement...
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Originally Posted by el_draco
chemistry and biology as we understand them
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This is the basic problem. Our knowledge is fledgling, consequently, we know little if anything at all when compared to the evolutional history of our planet.
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Originally Posted by bojan
believing is one thing, knowledge is another
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I love this statement... believing in this context is better known as "faith"... which takes us to a different topic, so I'll stop now.
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Originally Posted by AstralTraveller
AFAIK we couldn't even detect oxygen in the atmosphere of an extra-solar planet. It's not so much looking for the wrong telltale sign as not yet being able to detect the most obvious smoking gun. Until we can do that, the best we can say is that they haven't knocked on the door. Of course we haven't knocked on theirs either and we're here (though I'm not all here).
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Why would we have to concentrate on Oxygen? Are we, as a humans, stating that all intelligent life *MUST* breath oxygen? What about Groot? "He" takes in CO2 and exhales oxygen! Maybe we should concentrate on CO2, albeit difficult as it's a by-product of volcanism.
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Originally Posted by Max Vondel
Anthropomorphic reasoning doesn't help
Because life is abundant here...doesn't translate to the other places in the universe. Dolphins are intelligent but don't build radio telescopes or space capsules
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This is the best post in this thread...
Maybe life is abundant. Maybe there are lifeforms that are intelligent, but see no need to "expand to their surroundings" as the famous "Homo Sapiens" do. Maybe *MOST* lifeforms just keep to themselves and don't have the curiousity of humans. Maybe *we* are the outlier in the intelligent universe...
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Originally Posted by Max Vondel
However finding microbes is different to finding a space faring communicating civilisation by many orders of magnitude.
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Agreed, but life is life and if there is life, there is the possibility of intelligent life. We have a rudimentary form of it here on our planet, and I mean rudimentary, as there are still way too many problems to consider our species truly intelligent.
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Originally Posted by xelasnave
Yes but who knows what they build on the planet of the dolphins...
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I suspect not submarines...
As for the question about correlating intelligent life with economics...
money is a human construct. Other forms of life may not have it or need it. There could be a society of aliens that just get along for the survival of the species, each contributing to the advancement of the "species". The process of Natural Selection may work differently than it does here on earth.
OIC!