Dolphins are intelligent in James Blish's Jack Loftus novels, in Larry Niven's Known Space future history series and in Alan Moore's Halo Jones but Poul Anderson tells us here that their large forebrains merely process auditory input.
When Kyra wonders whether the only intelligences anywhere are human, artificial or neo:
"Abruptly the stars felt cold." (p. 216)
Brian Aldiss wrote somewhere that we had populated the Terrestrial environment, then the Solar System, with intelligences that are not there and he expected the same to be true of extra-solar intelligences. This is not a logical argument but feels compelling. A spaceship could arrive tomorrow but hasn't yet. One nearby star has not only planets but also large asymmetrical objects in orbit.
2 comments:
If there were intelligent species at our level of tech anywhere fairly near, we'd be able to detect them (keeping in mind that observing farther away means observing further back in time).
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
This is a vast topic, on which many, many books have been written (I've read some of them!). I recall Anderson suggesting in IS THERE LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS? that mankind might be one of the EARLIER intelligent races in the Milky Way galaxy to achieve a high tech civilization. If so, we might not have (yet) have been visited by xenosophonts because none or very few others have gotten as far as we have.
Personally, I find the notion of mankind being the only intelligent race to exist (either in the galaxy or the universe) repellent. It seems so, so WASTEFUL to think only one intelligent race exists!
Ad astra! Sean
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