It just occurred to me that if dinosaurs never existed here and we found them somewhere else, they’d be such an incredible discovery. We’re lucky to have such an awesome history of life on this planet.

Dinosaurs were only first discovered in 1824: https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/01/europe/megalosaurus-first-din...

It must have been an incredible discovery at the time.

Dinosaur fossils had been discovered before, but they were misidentified as elephants, whales or even giants and dragons.

"We’re lucky to have such an awesome history of life on this planet."

We are probably lucky, to have life at all.

Humans are probably unique. Intelligent life probably not and life at all is likely commonplace. It would be quite a miracle if given the size and scale of the universe Earth is the only place where life arose and also managed to evolve multiple intelligent species also emerged (cephalopods, dolphins, elephants, and primates at least)

There is a theory that humanoids aren't actually unique, if there's large animals on other planets in the universe. Our body plan has several survival advantages so it's quite possible evolution could have had similar results elsewhere. Bipedalism is really great for efficiency of locomotion (humans can walk really really far), and having two limbs with opposable thumbs is really useful for grasping and manipulating, which makes it much more likely that species will invent tools and technology.

Note I'm not claiming humanoids are all over the place, but with 400B stars in our galaxy, 1T stars in Andromeda next door, and other galaxies with similarly huge numbers of stars, multiplied by all the number of galaxies in the observable universe, multiplied by the number of exoplanets in the "Goldilocks zone", it's quite possible intelligent, humanoid life has evolved somewhere out there.

That would be a stronger claim than the one I made which is just that life exists in some form somewhere else in the universe with a relatively high abundance and it’s highly likely intelligent life exists somewhere as well.

It becomes harder to reason that humanoid life and even intelligent humanoid life must exist somewhere else without any actual data points.

>That would be a stronger claim than the one I made which is just that life exists in some form somewhere else in the universe with a relatively high abundance and it’s highly likely intelligent life exists somewhere as well.

Sure, but we're probably thinking of "intelligent life that can build a civilization", right? In that case, highly-intelligent alien orcas aren't going to meet the requirement. They just don't have a body type that allows them to change their environment and build technology. If there really are alien civilizations out there, like in Star Trek, that show might not actually be that far off with its assumption that 95% of them are humanoid. And in this case, there could very well be lots of other intelligent life, but which never managed to build a civilization.

If we’re bringing up fiction, why are we assuming Star Trek and not Cephalopods like in Arrival or completely alien morphologies like in Scavenger’s Reign. Even if there is a humanoid involved it could be as a host or slave for the intelligent life that controls it (eg dominion in Star Trek). With a sample size of n=1 of our planet (with no quantifiable way to even measure and compare intelligence), I think we’d be assuming a lot to make the conclusions you are making even if we restrict ourselves to those that can build up industry or even leave their planet. I’m also not sure why we’d care so much about leaving a planet - we’re desperately looking for any sign of life which would be a momentous discovery in and of itself. As for Orcas, don’t underestimate just how deadly humans are - we outcompeted concurrent competing intelligent hominids by killing or mating with them and regularly decimate wildlife and consume resources at a rapid pace. No reason to believe that an alien Orca with thumbs couldn’t eventually accomplish the things we did without ever leaving the water.

Star Trek used humanoids because of practical special effects at the time and because it would be easier for the audience to identify with the aliens and make the show more accessible, not because there’s some underlying scientific reasoning going on.

To make any predictions about the shape that intelligent aliens would take would require some probabilistic falsifiable model that would tell us where to look and what we’d find. Anything other than that would rely on very shaky first order reasoning which is what we’re doing to guess that there is likely intelligent life somewhere.

>I’m also not sure why we’d care so much about leaving a planet - we’re desperately looking for any sign of life which would be a momentous discovery in and of itself.

Just finding alien plant life somewhere would be a momentous discovery, but that's still nothing like finding an alien civilization that we can communicate with, trade with, etc. One doesn't diminish the other.

Alien orcas (probably) can't leave their planet, or really establish much of a technological civilization. So they'd be interesting to observe, just like alien plants or alien mice, but that just isn't the same kind of thing as interacting with an alien civilization.

>No reason to believe that an alien Orca with thumbs couldn’t eventually accomplish the things we did without ever leaving the water.

How so? How exactly are the alien orcas going to get out of the water to outcompete intelligent creatures on the land? Building any kind of technology in an aquatic environment would be incredibly difficult, if it's possible at all; if there's intelligent creatures on dry land, they'll have an automatic advantage. Sure, the alien orcas with hands and thumbs would have a much better chance than Earthly orcas that don't, but still, how do you, for instance, build a gun when you're an aquatic species? On dry land, it's really not that hard. Even smelting metals seems rather impossible underwater.

> not because there’s some underlying scientific reasoning going on.

Scientific reasoning wasn't the intention, but the idea that aquatic aliens have as much ability to build rockets and spaceships as land-based aliens is pure fantasy. The laws of physics don't change on other planets.

I have no idea what GOE is, but everything we learn about astronomy indicates that neither Earth nor our solar system is particularly unique, so “long sequence of dominoes” would be a very unlikely situation in something as large as the know universe, even ignoring the parts we could never observe.

Reminds me of "Carl's Doomsday Scenario" where they pick up a pet that happens to be an "a species seeded on all life-supporting planets, but a nasty asteroid caused them to go extinct here. I believe they are called 'Velociraptors' here."