What if we met life on mars and we were the intelligent ones...

CSU wrote: »

That hot Irish lady that works for Channel 4 Science (I think) was explaining chimp memory capacity and speed recognition...amazing stuff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJAH4ZJBiN8

Indeed it is, yet the average 8 year old(or younger) blows an adult chimp outa the water on cognitive prowess. Hell a 4 year old does. The ability that chimps show in such tests is not as big an indication of intelligence as it first appears. There is an element with humans where they think "oh we can't do that, therefore they must be clevererererer".

NOt necessarily. Look at people with cognitive faults like extreme autism or "idiot" savantism. Good example would be in art. Ask some 4 year old artistic extreme autistics to draw a car and they'll likely knock out a car drawing that looks bang on in perspective and form. It looks like a car. Ask a "normal" kid of the same age to draw a car and you'll likely get a flat 2D blocky looking yoke with all four wheels visible and a round faced mammy in the front. Is the Autistic more advanced? Not really(if impressive). They take a snapshot of "car" and reproduce it on paper. A photocopier can do that. The "normal" kid knows that a car has four wheels and mammy and daddy and bor and sis etc so will seek to reproduce that reality on paper. The latter is actually more accurate. There's more "truth" to it. As Picasso said, he could draw like Raphael when he was 8, but it took until he was in his 60's to draw like an 8 year old. He was always trying to seek the truth in reality that he could put on a canvas. That was much of what him and his mates were up to with Cubism.

The chimp might well recognise a photo of a car, but would be lost with a cubist painting of one. That for me is one of the big diffs in us humans. I suspect that's what made us very different to most humans that came before us. I suspect if we were to meet a Homo Erectus, they'd be much like extreme autistic folks. Very literal in interpretation. Yes they would be smart cookies, but without that extra spark that marks us out as different in the animal kingdom. That ability to know an object, beyond seeing an object.

On the alien front?

1) we have only one example of life and it only happened(as far as we know) the once on this "perfect" planet for it. We have no "aliens" here, never mind "out there". All life on this Earth is related. This may suggest that there is only one form of life possible, at least on planets like ours.

2) Until we find evidence of any life outside this planet any supposition, is well supposition even in the face of the huge numbers involved(surely there has to be??? stuff). While we can suppose that in a near infinte universe life must have gotten started elsewhere, one must also consider that even in a near infinite universe novelty and the one off must also exist. It has to exist by definition.

3) let's imagine life does exist out there. Then we have to question if intelligent life is out there. On this planet, our only example, intelligence in the modern human sense happened once. Just once, in the billions of years of it's existence and it nearly got wiped out a couple of times. Other adaptations? Flight? Insects, reptiles.dinosaurs, mammals, birds all came up with flight. Swimming? Goes triple. A shark looks like a fish, looks like a dolphin, looks like an ichthyosaur etc. Lots of examples of convergent evolution in response to selective pressures. Yet... Human level intelligence that means we become essentially the masters of the earth, certainly the potential to be and the potential to be masters of even more, like actual fiddling with the fabric of the universe? That only happens the once? I suspect at most, one animal/civilisation/intelligence per galaxy and until evidence to the contrary I'll stick by that.