The original post: /r/aliens by /u/Buckwellington on 2024-10-03 11:52:36.
It occurred to me the other day that we necessarily make a lot of assumptions in our attempts to look for signs of intelligent alien life, one being that they perceive and interact with time in ways similar to our own species. What if they live a thousand years and speak very slowly? So slowly that whatever signals they might be broadcasting into the impossibly vast reaches of space might seem like unpatterned blips of noise. Or the opposite: they live radically brief lives and operate at incredible speeds, concentrating their complexity into something completely inexplicable to us. That's just scratching the surface of all the ways we'd be likely to miss one another even if both species were looking and relatively close. Unless we turn up some microorganism on a Jovian moon we'll never encounter an alien at all--let alone an intelligent species, because "intelligent" for human beings is synonymous with similarity(maybe for the aliens too). I read a fascinating paper some time ago describing the surprising intelligence of a salticid spider, specifically portia. This arachnophagic spider exhibits forethought and planning in it's attacks and uses a wide variety of tricks and strategies to fool and lure in it's prey--and as I continued to read I realized that what the arachnologists were actually impressed with is this spider's similarity to humans as mobile, sight based predators. The spider's intelligence was similar to our intelligence in a recognizable way and therefore easy to identify and appreciate and understand. An alien species might very well not be. Even if they were close and looking I think we'd miss them. Forget it, I say we engineer extremophile bacteria for different environments and start seeding the solar system and beyond with earth life--the only way we might actually colonize space.