In nearly all movies, aliens are considered to have superior brains and intelligence than humans on Earth. Is there a reason why we don’t weigh in the fact that alien species could be of lesser intellect than us?
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Can’t speak to movies, but in reality:
We humans are a very young species, compared to others on Earth. Home Sapiens is only about 300,000 years old – many species last millions of years. Technologically, compared to any hypothetical other tool users from other worlds, we’re probably even younger. We’ve only been able to apply electromagnetism for about 150 years. If tool using species last for 1 million years – not a big deal, really – then we’re just babies. The odds of two babies finding each other before any other more advanced species do is almost certainly very small. We’re much more likely to encounter some species that’s been out there for hundreds of thousands of years, developing better ways of getting around and detecting species like themselves.
The odds of us encountering a much more advanced species has to be greater than the odds of finding a species that has just gotten started like us.
Humans cannot travel to other planets. We don’t have the knowledge or intelligence to make the technology to do such a thing. If the aliens turn up on Earth then it seems it should be pretty obvious that *they do* have said smarts and technology, therefore at least in some aspects they are more intelligent or superior to humans. It doesn’t make much sense for aliens to travel hundreds of billions of miles through deep space only to be dazzled by our Earthly technology.
In settings where humans *can* travel to other planets (such as Star Trek) aliens are usually presented where there are some which are more advanced and some which are less advanced than humans.
That is not always true. But a species that has perfected I interstellar travel compared to our current level of technology would be vastly more advanced. We’re not sure we can even make it to the next planet.
Humans have yet to solve the problem of interstellar travel. Any alien race that is able to reach Earth would presumably solve that problem and thus be more advanced than us.
There are fictional worlds that contain aliens who are on various stages in their evolution. Warhammer 40k for example acknowledges some alien worlds contain races still in the stone age, or in their medieval stages, etc, but they go to visit them. A stone age race isn’t going to come and visit us.
Any alien species that manages to travel through space and arrive on Earth is necessarily more technologically advanced than humans, by the very fact that they travel through space.
However, lots of shows like to depict less advanced alien species. Star Trek is the obvious an prime example.
because if they are stupid, they can’t visit us or use space travel?!
there might be snails and shit in other planets, but how should we know?
In many movies, aliens come to earth. If they made that trip while we can’t, they have superior technology and conclusions can be drawn from that.
But even then, it’s common to want the underdog to win. If it’s a movie where humans travel to meet aliens in space or another planet, making humans the underdog makes for a ~~better~~ more entertaining story most of the time.
Lot of scientists say that octopus genus of creatures are alien life forms that got here by meteorite aeons ago.
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