I donīt have time to respond to everyone, but I just wanted to say a couple things.

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In terms of intelligence and reasoning ability, they were every bit as smart as we are. ...there were people a thousand yeares ago that would put your intellect to shame. (This is not meant as a slam -- they would shame me too.) The difference is, of course, that we "modern" humans have a much larger storehouse of knowledge ... upon which to base our reasoning.


I agree. I was also thinking along the same lines and even the Newton quote came to mind when I wrote that. I guess my point was that we donīt know everything there is to know, particularly about our existence, and future generations will view us as simple and unknowledgable. So even brilliant people shouldnīt be so sure about what they īknowī.

Itīs interesting though how out of all of the species on earth, humans are the only ones that consistently increase their knowledge through each generation. And at this rate, sooner or later, humans will know everything there is to know, assuming that the universe is finite. And itīs interesting to note that how in the Bible, Adam and Eve ate from the garden of knowledge, and the snake told them that they would become like God and that they would know everything that God knows. We are also the only creatures on Earth that appear to worship a god, and the only ones to be ashmed of nudity.


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If one in every 800 trillion of those stars had life forming and evolving, that would leave about one and a quarter billion places where it happened.


So if we can assume that we live on one of 1.25 billion inhabited planets, then we can also assume that itīs a 1 in 1.25 billion chance that we are the most advanced life form. Thatīs pretty slim odds, so chances are there are creatures much more intelligent than us, which might mean they could teach us about our existence as well as we could teach a dog how an internal combustion engine works.

But, like you pointed out, thereīs a difference between intelligence and knowledge. So perhaps these super intelligent creatures donīt possess the uniquely-human ability to build upon knowledge from generation to generation.

They say thereīs a very small difference (like 2% difference I believe), between the chimpanzee brain and the human brain. I wonder if a human who lived in isolation from other humans his whole life (therefore not gaining any handed-down knowledge) would be any smarter than a chimpanzee. And this is the main reason why I think the disappointing books and movies about Tarzan are so damned unrealistic.