Are we alone?

Fantastic post arguing we are not alone. Spider man's uncle Ben used to say "With great power comes great responsibility" and we grossly eschew our responsibility for other species, leave alone aliens. We fail to even understand the umwelt and instead anthropomorphize the dog, the most luckiest animal in the planet pre-programmed to placate man.

"Let’s put this in perspective. Suppose that dogs were trying to signal another species of dog. How would they do it? By barking or howling, right? Would we notice that, as a signal of that type? Would we care? How much smarter, given some theoretical maximal potential for intelligence, are we than dogs? Infinitesimally, I would say. Our brains must fit, badly, inside our heads, folded up, in order to have expanded to the amount they have, which is about all our bodies will take, both in volume and metabolically.

Suppose we found out how to increase head size, or produce more efficient folding, or better, connect ourselves to our computers? Where would our intelligence go then? In the latter case, the practical limits would be… well, Icertainly can’t even begin to envision it. Now, given that we could be, let us conservatively say, 100 times more intelligent than now, how would we signal… what indeed would our picture of the universe be, our physics, our electronics? We are not now 100 times smarter than dogs. How would our physics compare with our present idea of physics? Etc. You see my point? To aliens, if they notice us at all, we are, until we can consciously increase our intelligence, merely another species of animal on this planet. So why should they want to contact us, any more than we would want to contact those dogs? And how would we notice or understand it, if they did, any more than dogs could conceive, build, and use a radio set?"

"The second theory is that we can’t contact them because when a civilization gets advanced to that stage, they just all move into their computer(s) and live happily ever after, in a virtual heaven of their own design, with the computer protected behind layers of armor and powered by something reasonably perpetual. Sounds good to me, anyway. So that’s my second theory as to why we haven’t and won’t contact them. They’re out there, zillions of them. They’re just living luxuriously in the basement, so to speak, hoping to go unnoticed for as long as possible.
Or it could be a combination of the two above, with extremely advanced virtual civilizations communicating with each other by means unavailable (and incomprehensible) to us, until we get to that point."

We as a species are always fascinated by the "unknown". That fascination and belief to decipher the unknown, has been an unique human trait (at-least as far as I can confirm) and it has been the central force behind science. I don't know if there are species outside our planet but believing that they do will enable us to thrive for more giant leaps. It's a kinda of a quasi Occam's razor but you have to agree it works like a carrot and stick approach. Here is the quote from one of my all time favorite movie by an all time favorite character:

"I'll tell you one thing about the universe, though. The universe is a pretty big place. It's bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of before. So if it's just us... seems like an awful waste of space. Right?" - Contact,  1997