Smart aliens? Unlikely, says scientist

The seemingly infinite universe begs to call this scientist an .... I truly belive there is life out their, intelligent life at that. However, I doubt they are of human form. But I bet they ask many of the same questions... Who am I? Why am I here? Is there other life out there? And we will definitely share one similarity.... the need to make more of ourselves. After all, we are only "vehicles for the replication of design information," as I would say all lifer forms are.

ALIENS ARE REAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AND WE SHOULD LOOK FOR THEM

Aliens are real! But my 2 questions are how far out they are and what do they want to do with us? And we shouldn't stop looking because there is something out there and we need to find out what it is! Everyone needs to do some reaserch and I mean everybody that can. Now some people think aliens are not real, but they are very real, and no that is not a plane in the sky that is ALIENS! Please all people of Earth listen and belive aliens

Before you go calling Dr. Lineweaver a moron, check out the full version of his chapter on the issue. You can find a downloadable pdf on his website. Either google Charley Lineweaver or paste in the following url:

www.mso.anu.edu.au/~charley/publications.html

Under "chapters in books" there is an article called "Paleontological Tests: Human-like intelligence is not a convergent feature of evolution" that lays out some of his arguments.

He also has a terrific article on the site(under refereed papers) dealing with life, entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, by the way. You might find that you agree with him a lot more than you expect to. The newspaper article above does not really provide enough information or context to make sense of the complex issues involved in the evolution of life and intelligence.

And we use to think the world was flat...

we were wrong on that one...

Wow, Guess we should just stop looking huh...

Aren't we evidence of a tendency to evolve a human-like intelligence? Does this moronic self-named 'astrobiologist', whatever that is, know how the brain has evolved over time, with ever increasing capability in new structures built on top of the more functional 'reptilian brain'. Does that give anyone a clue that there is a tendency for life to evolve toward intelligence? Do some research. And what's with the implication that 'human-like' and 'intelligence' are linked? I assume that's vanity talking. Intelligence lends it's wielder the capability to abstract from the physical, as humans do, so I expect another intelligence to be capable of the same 'human-like' behaviour. Another argument is that any system tends toward increased entropy according to the second law of thermodynamics. Ironically, the most highly ordered life form on this planet (man) has the greatest capacity for destruction (increased entropy). That's a tendency, if I'm not mistaken.

Heard it before. Buy a bottle of Rum.

Does it matter? It will always be a matter for conjecture. We can never get there. Surely we have enough problems of our own to sort out without venturing in to mythology

A billion stars in our galaxy, and roughly a billion galaxies in the universe, with each star potentially harbouring planets much like our own solar system. Now I'm not saying that there is intellegent life out there, but its extremely ignorant to believe that we are the only ones. They're not even investigating the tip of the iceburg yet, and they've made comments like "We should assume there isn't intelligent life out there. We see no evidence based on evolution on Earth for a tendency to develop human-like intelligence." Remember, assumption is the mother of all #@(&ups.