What do intelligent
ET aliens look like?
Adapted for the Internet from:

Why God Doesn't Exist

    1.0   Statistics about the possibilities of life are worthless

    Frank Drake formalized a now famous equation that synthesizes the likelihood of intelligence existing
    within our own galaxy.  He includes the following factors:

    •        The rate of formation of stars where intelligent life may develop.
    •        The percentage of such stars that have planets.
    •        The number of planets within a star that have an environment appropriate for life.
    •        The percentage of planets on which life develops.
    •        The percentage of planets with life on which intelligent life has developed.

    Drake concludes that there must be at least 10,000 planets teaming with intelligent life.

    Of course, since many of these parameters are speculative, the results depend on individual biases. Other
    analysts who have toyed with the equation come up with different numbers. Hence, we cannot answer the
    question until we make contact with another civilization and compare notes.

    But let’s concede for the sake of argument that there are at least 10,000 planets in the Milky Way with
    intelligent life. Would these beings look like us or would we be shocked with the ability of matter to assume
    such a variety of forms?

    There will be those that will question the relevance of physical appearance. How would shape relate to
    traveling aliens? Couldn’t they just as well be green, have antennas, or be made of silicon?

    From a rather trivial point of view, if aliens are alleged to look like us, it would be difficult to challenge such a
    theory. Maybe your wife or your next door neighbor is an alien? From a more relevant perspective, I
    propose that conditions have to be just right for intelligence to arise and no other kind of super-intelligent
    being can develop that is physically unlike man. Whether in the Magellanic Clouds, the Andromeda Galaxy,
    or the Milky Way, a planet boasting human-level intelligence has to be a virtual twin of the Earth, which
    means that the animals on the planet must have undergone a similar developmental history. If there is
    intelligent life elsewhere, the aliens look like us.

    At first glance this may sound like a biased, unsubstantiated conclusion. Wouldn’t it be just as likely for
    space aliens to look like sharks or birds?

    I think that this position is much harder to sustain. To begin with, can you imagine intelligent sharks
    invading us from another planet? What events in their evolution would have induced them to develop the
    sophisticated brain? Wouldn’t the construction of a spaceship require dexterous hands and an upright
    stance?

    Or if intelligent aliens are alleged to be exotic, silicon-based creatures, why didn’t at least one dynasty
    develop side by side with our carbon-based life here in the Solar System? Surely there is more silicon
    available than carbon! Hence, proponents must explain this omission before blurting out wild ideas simply
    for the sake of devil’s advocacy or to look interesting and creative.  

    It could also be argued that a chance interrelation or miscalculation could just as well have stopped
    intelligence at the level of Neanderthal or chopped the branch at Lucy altogether. Yet, in retrospect, T-Rex,
    the cheetah, and Man each in his own way seem to be an inevitable outcome of animals striving towards
    perfection in their respective lines of expertise. Mother Nature was obviously not finished with the hominids,
    a branch that was necessarily designed to descend from the trees. If there is a human level intelligence in
    another planet it looks like us and not like a  T-Rex or a cheetah. Wasn’t it 'foreseeable' in retrospect
    (explainable) that those competing on the plains would develop swift feet whereas those comparably
    vulnerable tree-dwellers were destined to develop dexterous hands and larger brains?

    Intelligence of the level of man could only come from an animal that resembles man. For example, let’s look
    at another category so as to be unbiased: speed. There are only so many categories of tetrapods:
    amphibians (no amiote), anapsids (no hole behind the eyes in the head), synapsids (1 hole) and diapsids (2
    holes). Mammals fall under the synapsids. If we traveled to another planet and found a mammal that ran at
    60 mph on the plains, what would he look like? Surely, like our very own cheetah. The cheetah is probably
    the fastest animal that ever lived. A cheetah is built for speed. It has aerodynamically built ears pointed
    backwards, streamlined body, etc. The cheetah was painstakingly constructed over millions of years. The
    same goes for the brain as for the legs. Intelligence does not swim in the oceans or gallop on the plains.
    Intelligence descends from the trees.


    2.0   What the mathematicians lament Mother Nature failed to bless them with: Super-intelligence

    While we’re at it, let’s dispose of the notion that there is an unfathomable level of intelligence that dwarfs the
    human level. Here's what the experts have to say:

    “ the laws of physics in our universe allow life forms way more intelligent than us” [1]

    " It is possible that failure of philosophical research to arrive at solid, generally
       accepted answers to many of the traditional big philosophical questions could
       be due to the fact that we are not smart enough to be successful in this kind of
       enquiry." [2]

    " superintelligence would by definition be far more effective than human brains
       in all intellectual endeavors, including strategic thinking, scientific analysis, and
       technological creativity." [3]

    " Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all
       the intellectual activities of any man however clever... an ultraintelligent machine
       could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an
       ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind." [4]

    I cannot vouch for Tegmark and Bostrom. Perhaps they were gypped at birth. But I believe that neither
    Tegmark nor Bostrom have the foggiest clue of what they are talking about! They are simply trying to
    weasel their way out of a jam with a statement of authority.

    The tactic consists in relying on an old cliché to induce gawking, impressionable readers to divert their
    attention from the issue at hand, which is that the presenter can’t answer the last question. Super-
    intelligence is a myth! One thing is knowledge (predicting a the results of an experiment) and another is the
    capability of understanding (explaining a consummated event). We may not have knowledge, but for
    Tegmark and Bostrom to insinuate that we do not have the capacity to understand God's ways is absolutely
    ludicrous. They insinuate that an ET's intelligence would be to Man's what Man's is to a cat. Since a cat
    does not have the natural ability to read or write, no amount of instruction is going to help the cat
    understand our world completely if at all. Now Tegmark and Bostrom extrapolate this reasoning and believe
    that we are in the same relation to extraterrestrials, or to God, or to a hypothetical human yet to appear. This
    line of reasoning comes from religion, where they have always answered the last question by saying that
    we cannot hope to understand God's ways.  

    Reality is something different. If an advanced civilization sent a group of researchers and they reached our
    shores, we possess the necessary intelligence where sooner or later we would learn and understand
    whatever they try to teach us. Unfathomable super-intelligence is a myth perpetuated by those who have no
    answers to the questions asked at the end of the presentation. So they raise the stakes by throwing in that
    we humans are so stupid and know so little and will never get to know everything, and that this explains
    why the presenter can’t answer your question. And everyone in the audience nods and goes: “Yeah, we are
    but mortals! It is arrogant to think that we can understand God's mysterious ways!” That’s what everybody
    has been trained to believe from kindergarten to college. This enables the presenter to leave the decisive,
    last question open-ended. The establishment also falls back on the super-intelligence myth to support its
    notion of exponential technology. This, in turn, guarantees that the funds keep flowing in.

    In the present context, intelligence is simply the ability to understand concepts, and here there is no doubt.
    We have reached the highest level of intelligence possible in the Universe. Those within the human species
    at the forefront of intelligence can sooner or later understand anything that is explained to them by an
    uninvited ET or by God Almighty Himself! In the case of invading aliens we would merely have to go through
    a learning curve to understand their technology or advanced scientific concepts just like we go through a
    learning curve to understand Math or Chemistry. If the idiots of the establishment are waiting for the fairy
    godmother to grant them more grey matter, they will be sorely disillusioned. Mother Nature has run out of
    wishes to concede. We are as intelligent as we will ever get. The bozos that are unsatisfied with what they
    got should take the issue up with their parents.


    3.0   The aliens look like us

    Thus, if we cannot say whether there is life on another planet much less can we speculate whether the
    process results in human level intelligence. What we can say is that if we find Man on another planet, he is
    the product of a stringent specification, each step of which has certain critical tolerances. Since anything
    could have gone wrong at any stage of this lengthy process, we have to conclude that Man is indeed a rare
    product. But then, so is a whale and an elephant and an ant. All existing animals are the product not only of
    the environment, but of interrelations with a specific family of plants and of animals. Again, this line of
    reasoning cannot be used to 'predict' whether there are intelligent beings in another planet (i.e., say
    whether aliens exist). What it means is that if we come across Man in another planet, he is the product of
    following to the letter a set of stringent specifications. And if we come across a being on another planet that
    has the same ability to understand abstract concepts as we do, this being better look more or less like us.

    Determinism has its advantages. If humans are an inevitable outcome of nature, and, assuming further that
    man occupies no privileged place in Mother Nature’s heart and that intelligence at its best looks like us, our
    analysis simplifies enormously. By studying ourselves, we study the highest possible level of 'intelligence'
    (i.e., understanding) anywhere in the universe. And, whatever happens to us, happens to them too.

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    Last modified 05/22/08


        Copyright © by Nila Gaede 2008
Mother Nature was so fed up with
war on our planet, Bill, that she made
syntheses from diverse aspects of
the warring parties. I was lucky. I was
a mathematician. So in addition to
strong legs and a diamond head, I
was blessed with an electric field.