If there are other civilizations out in the universe, would they have to be mammalian?

S

Superfrog

New member
Would they? I mean can reptilian creatures or insects evolve to our thought capacities? Or is it a purley mammalian, or even primate ability of function. certainly if there are other species on Earth who have complicated though similar to our own I would assume it would be some other mammal. Am I right? If so why/why not?
District 9 is a movie though, if there could be other sapient species from other families then how come the Dinosaurs who were here for hundreds of millions of years didnt even come close to what we have accomplished in a fraction of earths life? Mammals are supior bitches!
 
I know that we would like to think so. I wouldn't mind seeing another intelligent species out there in the cosmos...humanoid or otherwise. After all...I am a Star Trek fan just like a lot of the professional scientists and astronomers out there.

We just can't say at present...that there is anything like that out there as of yet.

I wish we could...but...there's no way to tell right now.
 
The ability to do work, to modify one's environment, to make a difference in lifestyle, technology, energy production and usage, almost requires a warm-blooded creature. This is because the cold-blooded ones spend too much time controlled by external, rather than internal temperatures. Lizards and the like sleep in the sun, warming themselves so that they will have blood flow and internal temperature and energy production in their muscle cells to do work. Warm blooded creatures don't have to spend that time. And they can be active all year long, regardless of weather.
Now we come to birds. Warm-blooded, yes. Mammals, no. That means that there is a possible line of development for warm-blooded reptilians (were the dinosaurs in that class? Maybe).
It may have been just a cosmic accident that determined the present rule of mammals rather than warm-blooded dinosaurs.
But let us look at past records. The dinosaurs ruled practically unchanged for hundreds of millions of years.
Not true of mammals. They evolved may times faster.
 
I can't think of a reason why other creatures couldn't, in time, develop thought capabilities similar to ours. On Earth, mammals such as chimpanzees, whales, dogs, cats and dolphins are certainly very intelligent: however, I've heard that other species have shown 'human thinking' too, like birds. I read in the newspaper a couple of months ago about the extroadinary reasoning capabilites of magpies.
 
Since we are mammals, we tend to think that only mammals can be intelligent.
But that is not necessarily reality.
On Earth, mammals evolved into intelligent beings but under other circumstances and environments, intelligence could arise in insects, reptiles, birds or some other life form.

Even on Earth, there are intelligent insect colonies (termites, bees, ants) - not our form of technological intelligent, but their own form of intelligence.
 
There's no reason to assume that their planet would have mammals at all. They might be a silicon based life-form for all we know.
 
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