UN to appoint Earth contact for aliens

"they are more likely to be microbes than anything intelligent"

I'm curious what the probability is that this statement is true. Alien species that have been around much longer than us may view humans as microbe-like in intelligence.

This is almost amusingly irrelevant--if contact is actually made with an alien intelligence and this guy tries to step up and say "I'm in charge of this", there's no doubt someone more powerful would try and take over.

Astrophysicist Neil Tyson makes a great point on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-uZZ7RdL5E

Essentially: chimpanzees share ~98% of our DNA, yet we don't view them as having anything near our intelligence. If it only takes a 2% difference for this to happen, imagine how more advanced alien species might view us.

What does DNA have to do with it?

Wikipedia has a helpful timeline of life on Earth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_evolution#Basic_tim...

You would most likely meet completely unintelligent microbes on Earth. Or no life at all. Maybe some stupid animals or plants.

The likelihood of meeting intelligent life during the existence of this planet is something like 0.004 percent (200,000 years of intelligent life on a 4.5 billion year old planet), the likelihood of meeting nothing but microbes is greater than fifty percent. It’s consequently only reasonable to expect most alien life to be microbes.

Older intelligent civilizations could certainly exist on older planets but the age of the universe is only 14 billion years. If the average planet is something like 7 billion years old (based on the naive assumption that planets form at a constant rate) then it is only reasonable to expect that most intelligent life out there existed for no longer than something like 2.5 billion years. Oh, and past mass extinctions on Earth cast serious doubt on the ability of complex life to survive for very long. Microbes, on the other hand, are undisturbed by asteroids and volcanoes.

That’s not human arrogance. That’s just how it looks to be at the moment.

Should we find an Earth-like planet sometime in the future and detect oxygen in its atmosphere I would expect to meet microbes, not intelligent beings. (We will certainly be able to detect Earth-like planets very soon and we might even be able to detect whether those planets have oxygen but we will probably never be able to actually go there so this point is kind of moot.)