[gathly]

if the thing we have labeled "life" on this one planet, this one context on this one planet we use an example, exists anywhere else, and if this thing we can barely define in our own species as "intelligence", which we base entirely on one species as the default example of, has somehow arisen from that "life" somewhere else, and this "intelligence" uses anything like the same concepts as ours that would be able to recognize anything remotely similar to our concepts and symbols we use in our "intelligence" and they have some concept of responding to the electromagnetic spectrum that interact with this "intelligence", and they exist on any of these planets that has the possibility of ever detecting Earth, then sure, they may be watching.

[dotnet00]

This feels like way too cynical of a take. Intelligence in this context means the ability to develop the tools necessary to detect other unusual planets.

Anything at that level of development will of course be aware of the electromagnetic spectrum, just as how we can't see in the infrared and have developed tools to do it for us, or how we've become aware of gravitational waves and are refining our tools for listening to them.

They don't even have to be based on the same chemistry. The only conditions on them would be that they are slightly more advanced than us to be able to do exoplanet atmospheric spectroscopy en masse. Earth would really stand out for being oxygen rich without the temperatures to explain some sort of extreme activity.

[filoeleven]

GP didn’t strike me as cynical, only more of a call to broaden our expectations!

> Intelligence in this context means the ability to develop the tools necessary to detect other unusual planets.

What if instead of attempting to detect planets, they just spam the universe with their space-hardened eggs, and hope that eventually they’ll smack into something habitable? Seems a lot more productive than analyzing incoming UV rays for thousands of years, then spending who knows how long to figure out how to get to the ones we suspect are interesting.

We are concerned with disseminating our discoveries and keeping in touch with the folks back home. But a non-hierarchical intelligence (by whatever hand-wavey metric you want to use for “intelligence”) might be more concerned with simply existing in as many places in which it can survive in as possible, whether Mom and Dad know about it or not.

This isn’t science fiction: I’d estimate there’s 1e10 spore-producing mushrooms on Earth on any given day. (That’s only a couple steps away from a wild-ass guess, but hear me out.) One mushroom can produce over a billion spores per day, 1e9. That’s 1e19 “eggs” every single day, and that number hasn’t changed significantly for thousands of years. It’s a staggering number.

This is science fiction: Imagine mushrooms are aliens who originally came from a planet with a more turbulent atmosphere, one which promotes more ejections of tiny spores into space. Imagine that their spores are drastically more long-lived and more spaceworthy (the Earth ones already do pretty well).

This isn’t science fiction: Mushrooms (well, fungi) have a symbiotic relationship with an overwhelming majority of plants. They are crucial to forests; there’s a viable hypothesis that forests only exist because mushrooms “decided” to farm trees. That decision, if the hypothesis is correct, played a huge role in the development of humans and therefore big telescopes.

Even if they’re native earthlings (they probably are), could they represent an intelligence whose comprehension of their environment, existential goals, mode of communication, etc. is too far outside of what we are used to in order to recognize them as being intelligent?

To bring it back around to what GP wrote, fungi do pay attention to humans, an analogue for “watching” us. They “hear” our footsteps and send hyphae to investigate, because we often track tasty things from our shoes onto their rooftops. If we cannot even speculatively judge a homegrown lifeform’s intelligence, why do we think we’ll stumble across an alien species that makes more sense to us? Those odds seem even less in our favor.

[blooalien]

Your mushroom overlords have taken notice of your words and shall ensure you a particularly cushy spot in the dirt mines after their peaceful takeover of Earth is completed.

[filoeleven]

I am writing to confirm that this was indeed my goal, and I am definitely not a Vermont forest mycelial mat that figured out how to use a RaspberryPi someone dropped on me, gauging the humans’ response to the idea of said peaceful takeover.