> Incidentally, you can add that to your list of reasons why Earth can't possibly support advanced life I did think of that, read the comment again - it's the

> Incidentally, you can add that to your list of reasons why Earth can't possibly support advanced life I did think of that, read the comment again - it's the one about the extreme temperature variations which prevent higher life forms from arising :) But yeah, harsher environments leading to harsher species feels instinctively right, though on the other hand what's considered a strength on one world will be a weakness on many others. On Earth, most life is coupled pretty tightly to the local conditions and that's why so many species die off whenever some minute changes occur. Luckily, there are more resilient generalists around as well, like us. And if technology-producing intelligence is a generalist trait, we could assume life on other worlds to be similar in that regard. Intellectual generalism seems to require, or at least strongly favor, a departure from innate mental dispositions in favor a cultural imprinting. So that leaves some measure of hope that, whatever an intelligent species' origins, traits such as being warlike might not be inescapable. Anyway, it's unlikely there are Klingon-style people out there who can just come here and perform much better in our own environment than us, the natives. At least not without massive technological help, which kind of nullifies the importance of biological strength.