Why SETI is a Waste of Time - Part II
I have a question for those gullible enough to believe in "little green men" of the sort seen in Fox's Alien Autopsy - why would any reasonable person expect aliens to look like hairless, bipedal primates? This strains credibility, given that were it possible to run through the history of life on earth once more, the chances of creatures like ourselves arising would be essentially none. We almost certainly wouldn't be here were it not the Permian and Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinctions, neither of which were in any way destined to occur.
Beyond the odds stacked against creatures like the primates appearing on planets other than our own, it would still strain credibility to think it likely that some of these creatures would develop the precision grip that has made possible our ability to make sophisticated tools (and I use the term "sophisticated" for a good reason - other great apes can make simple tools by, for instance, stripping branches of their leaves and then using them to fish for ants, but as they all lack a precision grip, none of them are even physiologically - much less mentally - equipped to make stone tools of even the simple Oldowan variety).
We have to face the fact that if life does exist on other planets, it is unlikely to be intelligent in anything like the same sense in which we understand the term. Even if it is intelligent, it is unlikely to share quite the same yearning we have to explore the reaches of space for other life-forms (a yearning, that, if one is being honest, is probably felt by no more than a marginal percentage of the earth's populace).
