[beamatronic]

Consider the way such life looks to us. It's stuck down there, hampered by its environment. We might look that way to an advanced civilization. "Check out those humans, they're intelligent but they're stuck way down there on the crust of that planet, under all that air, stuck in their gravity well"

[marktangotango]

That's very true, if earths Gravity was just a bit stronger chemical rockets couldn't even make it to orbit. Like right now we can only get 5 to 10 percent of vehicle mass to orbit, imagine if that where 1 or .001 percent. That would make space exploration incredibly expensive. It's already prohibitive at our level of gravity.