Rebe’s Reviews > The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal about Aliens – and Ourselves > Status Update

“Is it possible that we, ourselves, are artificial creatures, seeded onto planet Earth by intelligent aliens billions of years ago? … If [so], then that life would evolve according to the same rules as life that arose spontaneously. Most likely, then, we would not be able to distinguish such simple artificial organisms from ‘actual’ biological ones… But there is no sign of this.”

“Recent studies strongly suggest that bacterial life is capable of surviving for millions of years in space, so much so that rock ejected from Earth by the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs may already have made its way to the moons of Jupiter—when we finally arrive there, we may well find life based on the same DNA as our own, carried by dormant bacteria on a 60-million-year journey.”

Now we’re really getting into hypotheticals of hypotheticals. What if there’s a species of intelligent aliens, and what if they’ve evolved to be more intelligent than humans, and what if they’ve created super-intelligent robot creatures, and what if the super-intelligent robot creatures can rewrite their own code?

“If alien animals use sound for their alarm calls, their screams will probably be very much like ours.”

“On Earth, the more complex an animal social structure is, the more complex the cognitive demands on each individual in that society. This shows in the complexity of their communication, in the diversity of their responses to other members of their group, and even in their brain size.”

Another option for alien superintelligence: individual aliens working together as one hive mind. More likely to be “the result of conscious engineering” than evolution.

On the question of alien superintelligence: unlikely. “Either the species will develop technology [AI] instead of better brains, or the species will run out of intellectual challenges.” And those challenges would be necessary to prompt the evolution of intellect. But one thing the author doesn’t mention is an alien becoming smart enough to artificially enhance its own brain. Hmm.

2/2 in their history, there is only a tiny chance that we would happen to stumble across them in those 1st 100 years since they discovered radio… All the same, … they may be more advanced technologically, but does that mean they would be more intelligent?”

1/2 “We often… assume that those aliens with whom we can expect to have a conversation will be more technologically advanced than us… We are absolutely in the infancy of our technological development, and that makes it exceptionally likely that any aliens we encounter will be more advanced than us. They could be older than us or younger…but if we were to encounter an alien civilization at some random point

If the alien species is smart enough to build a telescope, they probably have “essential corollaries of what we call intelligence. Curiosity will drive philosophy, social interaction will drive art, and complex communication will drive literature.” In Earth evolution, “sea lions, as well as intelligent parrots…, enjoy music and dance… Chimpanzees laugh and appear to have an understanding of humor.”