> We’ve poured money into SETI to try and answer the anguished question, are we alone? Well, it seems that we aren’t, but we might be too stupid and self-absorbed to notice.
There was an episode of the second season of the new "Cosmos" where they looked at SETI.
One of the points of the episode was that we might be looking right at intelligent life and not even recognize it. We tend to only see intelligence when it comes from an individual organism with a brain. We tend to dismiss or not even consider other ways there might be intelligence and gave a couple examples from here on Earth.
One example was bees. A bee hive as a group exhibits intelligent-like behavior beyond what an individual bee is capable of.
Another example was forests. Underground in forests there is a vast network of mycelium linking the plants together. When something bad happens to a tree that gets communicated through the mycelium network to other trees and they react making changes to better cope with the threat. It operates very similarly to a nervous system for the whole forest, but much slower than animal nervous systems.
If most intelligence in the universe is hive minds or is big slow brains like planet-spanning mycelium networks we might completely overlook it.
"If most intelligence in the universe is hive minds or is big slow brains like planet-spanning mycelium networks we might completely overlook it."
Or intelligent life made up off entirely other principles(and with very different goals to survive), than what we know. Do we understand what is going on inside of jupiter? Or inside the sun? Maybe there is life, that starts to evolve at certain pressures and temperatures? Well, maybe not likely, but I am glad, that the self centered philosophy, that the sun and the whole universe all are moving around us humans who are on top of it all, fades a bit more. I mean, we clearly are awesome at technology and so far we have not seen much technology from any other species. But maybe very advanced life has no need for our tech anymore, so we would not spot it, by looking for it.
I think when we talk about finding intelligent life, what we really mean is "intelligent life on other planets". We know there's intelligence here on earth in those examples you describe. But what of it? We are already studying those things and trying to understand them. What's groundbreaking is not that there is intelligent life, but that there might be on different planets.
There was an episode of the second season of the new "Cosmos" where they looked at SETI.
One of the points of the episode was that we might be looking right at intelligent life and not even recognize it. We tend to only see intelligence when it comes from an individual organism with a brain. We tend to dismiss or not even consider other ways there might be intelligence and gave a couple examples from here on Earth.
One example was bees. A bee hive as a group exhibits intelligent-like behavior beyond what an individual bee is capable of.
Another example was forests. Underground in forests there is a vast network of mycelium linking the plants together. When something bad happens to a tree that gets communicated through the mycelium network to other trees and they react making changes to better cope with the threat. It operates very similarly to a nervous system for the whole forest, but much slower than animal nervous systems.
If most intelligence in the universe is hive minds or is big slow brains like planet-spanning mycelium networks we might completely overlook it.