Why is it that out the 9M+ species that have existed on earth, only 1 turned out to be super intellegient.

Look at our world. We humans are absolutely incredible. Electricity, Internet, Space Travel, buildings taller than mountains! Why are the other creatures of the world so far behind? Can any even light a fire yet?

This makes me think that the Universe might not actually be big enough for Intelligent life forms that are more intelligent than us.

It's already extremely rare for life-capable planets to exists, add the fact that life is not easy to initiate, and multiply all that by the chances of human-like intelligence(which according to earth it's about 1 in every 9,000,000)..

K. So my main question is...How many life forms are there in the universe that are more Intelligent than humans?

omg lmaooooooooooooo i love u "can any of the lessor species light a fire yet"

"Why is it that out the 9M+ species that have existed on earth, only 1 turned out to be super intellegient."

is not a good answer. Try again.

How would we know? We have know way of directly calculating the scope of the universe nor the number of potentially viable planets it holds, and no way of knowing if there are any beings intellectually superior to us. Hell, we could be the friendly neighborhood idiots of the universe, and we wouldn't know.

Lol duh. Use your knowledge of probability, space, bio/physics/chemistry to make an educated estimate.

Don't duh me, you literally can't make such an estimate. We simply don't know the extent of occupied space or the hard details of this ****, sorry.

Its literally impossible to know if there are aliens as smart or smarter than us but if there are they're probably not much smarter since we haven't heard from them.

I read an article that touched on this, it was really interesting. It was about some type of paradox about how only few life forms are able to pass a certain level of intelligence that enable them to colonise a galaxy. While humans may be on their way to exceed this level, wouldn't much older civilisations have already done this?

Someone help me what was the name of this paradox

500,000,000,000 Galaxies • 40,000,000,000 Earth Like Planets per Galaxy• .01 (chances of any life at all) • 1/9,000,000 (creatures as smart as humans)

****. My estimate = 2.22x10^13 species that match our intelligence.

I wonder if any of those can travel faster than light?

How have they not found us first yet ?? I bet there's a planet that's so big every inhabitant is the size of Earth

If they match our intelligence, I would venture to guess the answer is they can't travel faster than the speed of light.

Using E=mc2 we can never reach the speed of light so we need to get around the rules of general relativity. The faster you travel the more energy you expend until you need infinity to reach light speed and that would mean infinite kinetic energy and infinite mass which is impossible.

However nothing rules out warp drives and that is exactly what NASA is testing right now in labs. They are working on the first warp bubbles. If they can manage to warp space time in a lab then it's a matter of scale after that.

With warp drive you won't run in to time dilation where you leave the plant for 10 months and come back and 10 years have passed back on earth.

You're forgetting one thing: time.

There are entire galaxies out there that have been around a lot longer than our tiny milky-way galaxy.

Add that to the fact that there are 200-400 stars in our galaxy alone, most of them containing their own gravitational pull and solar system like our own. Times that by the number of observable galaxies (hundreds of billions) and you start seeing that the probability is extremely high. In fact, the probability of us being the ONLY intelligent life becomes laughable.

e=mc2 is based on the physics of our planet and Earth's gravitational pull. Beings living on another planet, with a different gravitational pull live by different physics. At least in theory.

I don't think the universe has life forms as intelligent as us

addressing this part exclusively: it's not that they're incapable, it's more so to do with the fact that they have no need to develop self-awareness or intelligence.

every organism's innate instinct is to survive. if a family of rabbits generally finds enough food to suffice and can keep numbers relatively high against predators, there's no need for them to use energy to develop a higher form of consciousness.

the initial reason humans came about was to vast ecological changes which drove our ape ancestors out of africa and its waning lush environment. faced with large predators and little choice for food, what did we do?

intelligence is largely relative to an animal's needs. chimps can wield rocks to break open hard fruit, dolphins + birds have been known to use tools as well.

as for your other question, idk. for a very young species orbiting a very young star, we've only consciously experienced a snapshot millisecond of the universe's timeline, as could be the case for other intelligent alien species before or after our time. it could be that life is so transient that it's hard for any two parallel timelines to cross.

fermi

Not even science knows this. Space is different at all from earth. Here on earth, there are species EVERYWHERE and scientists can guesstimate based on their knowledge of species and distribution the percentage of all species, unknown species, extinct species, rate of extinction, etc. But space is a different situation. It's too vast and no evidence of life outside of earth has been found yet, let alone have an estimate of the amount of intelligent ones.

I mean. Considering the vast majority of extraterrestrial life (and terrestrial) is going to be microbial, I'd say the percentage is incomprehensibly small, but seeing as the universe is incomprehensibly vast and unknown it's literally impossible to ever quantify an exact number of alien life forms.

This is a really dumb question.

lol @ that math up in the middle of this thread. The ****