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Originally Posted by st.cronin
What do we mean by "intelligent life," or even "life"? Not a flip question, I'm serious. I think life on earth is defined by "having working dna", right? It doesn't seem likely that standard will apply universally, so I think intelligent life is supposed to mean sentient life, which how do you know if something is sentient or not?
One of my favorite readings is from one of Kurzweil's books (forget which one) where he puts forward a convincing proof that there are planets which right now are completely inhabited by nano-technology.
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I once read (and can only vaguely remember) a short story by Arthur C. Clarke about a "life form" that was purely electrical.
The nano example is a good one. We can view things through microscopes and telescopes, but that's still a limited range when you consider that things can be (presumably) infinitely bigger or smaller still.
It's definately a point worth considering; life is as it is on Earth because that's how it evolved to the conditions on this planet through trial and chance over a great period of time. On a different life-supporting planet with different conditions chances are things are going to evolve quite differently than how they did down here. What we consider "Intelligent life" might be an Earth-centric view. A "life form" from a different planet might not resemble any kind of life form or intelligence that we can measure or even detect.
I think we are very unlikely to find humanoid-like life forms in the universe simply because we are so much a product of the world we are from, and if things had not gone our ancestor's way all those many years ago, we might never have even been.