The animals you cited are intelligent animals but nowhere close to our intelligence. They haven't come up with computers. They haven't come up with complex language. They have no technology that rival ours.
What makes you think aliens won't be as much more intelligent than humans as humans are than dolphins/pigs/chimps? I'd venture that one of the primary reasons humans are technologically superior is because our evolution formed us into social groups first and allowed us to accelerate our intelligence explosion slightly faster than them, and since we took over the planet, other species of intelligent animals have either been unable to or have simply not yet achieved a critical mass to catch up. Just because we were first doesn't mean that nobody else will be able to match (or surpass) us.
Human intelligence is just remarkable and it is truly human. Other planets harboring life will be unlikely to be like us. Even intelligent creatures will unlikely ever come to the point where they think abstractly like we do. We can do complex math. Non-humans can't. We can conceptualize and have abstract ideas and implement them, non-humans can't.
I agree that alien life would be unlikely to be anything even remotely like us. However, I disagree with the latter bits claiming that because they'd be different, they'd never be able to match (or even surpass us).
On our planet, we were the first species to develop cultural intelligence, which allowed us to propel our intelligence explosion at speeds far faster than evolution. However, that doesn't mean that it's a unique solution and the only possible answer to higher-level intelligence, and assuming that it both is the only solution, and that we're the only species which would ever be able to achieve that, is nothing more than human exceptionalism, which is baseless.
We are relatively newcomers. And I don't think we'll last long. I don't mean in 100 years but in 10,000 years later, 'well be gone. 99% of species appear and disappear already. So why should we stay here forever? It's not possible. The climate will get worse and more hostile to us and we'll also merge with machines and lose interest in "survival."
Yes we are new. So why don't you think other species on other planets which may have developed human-level (or higher) intelligence long before us, couldn't have existed or developed?
I agree that if we don't annihilate ourselves, we'll eventually have to move beyond our own planet simply because we'll exhaust all of our planetary resources otherwise. Your last point is more baseless claims, since you both don't know that it'll happen, and even if it did, you have no reason for expecting machine-man hybrids to be any less interested in survival (if anything, I'd think they'd be more focused on it, since that would be a form of extending our survival).
If you can name another intelligent species that can produce nuclear weapons then be my guest. Not a "speciest attitude" but a fact. Our intelligence as human species makes us the most dangerous animal species on the planet. Prove me where I'm wrong.
We had a head start. I will agree that we're likely the most dangerous animal currently on the planet, both to ourselves and other species. I mentioned other intelligent species because he claimed that intelligence couldn't develop outside of humans, which is just silly.
By the same token, our intelligence have resulted in us threatening our own survival. We are the most hostile and destructive species on the planet.
I'd go with "most resourceful" first, which is what leads to us being able to be the other two aspects. But that certainly is an artefact of our intelligence. Which, of course, has nothing to do with whether or not human-or-higher levels of intelligence could develop again (or already have elsewhere).
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said there is sky!
