Originally Posted by Fetish Gimp

This is the mistake most people make when discussing possible alien technology and contact: using human development as a reference.

How can anyone even pretend to guess how fast an alien culture would develop technology? Maybe their physiology would disperse with the need, their brains being able to manipulate matter using quantuum properties which we can't guess exist.

Or they would be some kind of colony-intellect like ants, using proxy bodies to explore the galaxy.

Even if you use human development as a reference just think of the technological advances we have made in a mere one thousand years. Now imagine an alien culture that was five thousand years ahead of us, which in the big scheme of things is less than a blink of an eye.

Is there life in the Universe other than us? I find it difficult to believe there isn't.

Is there "intelligent" life in the Universe other than us? That's a different, and kind of scary question because if we use human history as an example every time a technologically superior culture has met what they saw as a technologically inferior culture, the primitives got fucked into extinction or almost.