Intelligent life may exist elsewhere in the cosmos from "summary" of Cosmos by Carl Sagan
The idea that there might be other beings as clever or cleverer than we are, inhabiting some other world in our galaxy or beyond, is one that has long fascinated us. It is a wonderfully liberating idea. It means that there is a great diversity of ways of being intelligent. It means that intelligence is not a parochial and narrowly human characteristic, but is shared by many kinds of beings. It means that we are not alone. It is a perspective that provides new meaning to the biblical phrase "In the image of God." We are a very young species, in geological terms. If we shared a single day with all the other creatures of the Earth, mammals would have been here since about 11:45 p. m., reptiles since about 11:59:35 p. m., and humans since only the last 20 seconds. This may suggest that other civilizations, if they exist, might be millions or billions of years older than we. Their technologies might be as far beyond ours as ours are beyond the chimpanzees. The key question is: What is the probability that other in...
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