lol gotta agree. Theres a difference between intelligence and common sense.

They may be smart enough to make the ships to bring them all the way to our planet and remain undetected, but they may not posess enough common sense to realise that staying undercover/studying us is the smartest thing. They may rely on brawn. Or they may just go. Who can tell. They may even go land in Antartica in order to avoid us.

or they may think that we're some destructive parasite and never even acknowledge we have intelligence or are conscious. What we consider to be intelligence may be a laughable animal-level intelligence to them. Then again, it could be the other way around...for all we know, the aliens may not have any type of intelligence at all. Maybe they build spaceships, maybe the stole them, maybe somehow they're genetically programmed to build high technology without understanding it. Who knows. There are so many wild possibilities we can't even begin to know what they'd be like.

Then again, maybe they'll be just like us. Statistics would probably argue against that, but who knows.

Well laws of physics are the same all over the universe, so probably the things needed for life to exist as well. It could be that for a living being to be succesfull, it needs to be able to build complex things, wich brings the needs for something like a hand, for example. Dolphins are very intelligent, but they can't build spaceships.

I think WE will be the 'weird aliens' that make contact with another planet and appear super-intelligent.

That's just a matter of chance.

Of course there aren't any aliens monitoring us...we all know that if there would be, they'd have made me king of the world long ago. Kinda like Dr. Breen in HL2, but sexier.

Its almost laughable now.

Even if they were bent on world domination they would have to study us and our enviroment first, even for a short time. They would probably want to make sure there isnt anything harmful or potentially deadly to them like diseases, pollution, etc.

I would suspect any intelligent aliens civiliation probably walked close to the same path as we did: IE: industrial revolution, etc. Technology would probably have been close to the same given all the elements and math is universal across the universe. The biggest difference would be the belief/social systems and biology.

Though I understand your reasoning, and you're probably right, assuming they're alot like us could be dangerous. As for math....

We (and most of the world) now use base 10 math. But there have been other cultures that used different bases, and it made for a different mathematical world. Mayans, for instance, used a base of 20 and actually understood the concept of 0. They also never invented the wheel.

But anyway, who knows. Until we meet them, who can say how normal or abnormal they'd be?

Why?

Because the laws of nature, physics and the universe exist throught the universe, not just here on earth. Granted aliens would come from a different planet. That planet would probably have minerals and such. Unless the aliens just became intelligent and self suffient at the begining of the universe, although very unlikly, they would have started out mentally the same as we did. Limit knowledge of their universe, laws of physics and what not. Over time they probably would have found a engery source on their planet and from there the rest would be history.

Now, their could be aliens on other planets that dont need any form of engery to sustain life. These types aliens would probably mind their own busy and stay on their planet. For a biological being to move about the galaxy it would need a vessel of some kinda, building that vessel would take energy and materials and some advanced knowledge of space.

So, they would have to be advanced enough to understand space travel.
They would have to have a engery source to power their ability to build space vessels. They would need energy source to power the vessel.

Any aliens that didnt need a space vessel or an engery source would probably be so advanced that we would never notice if they came here or not. They would probably see us as dumb animals and not really care about us.

Any alien races that comes here in a vessel has at some point in their past created a vehicles that uses engery. They may or may not have the wheel for instance, they might have skipped the wheel and went straight into anti-gravity but it would still need power. It would obviously be renewable and reusable. But before, back in their history, they would have been a time where they didnt have a renewable resuable fuel source in which they probably would have uses something found on their planet.

If they didnt use a vessel and instead used some kind of portal system, the portal system would need power and material to build.