Quote Originally Posted by Zotoaster View Post
Well, literarly sending something (whether it's humans or robots) into space really is the only way of discovering non-intelligent life (after all, I'm not talking about colonisation here). If there is intelligent life, interstellar telephone messages really would be the way to go I assume, which is what SETI is all about.
What will be interesting if indeed we ever do meet intelligent life out there will be deciding whether or not this life is conscious or not. We can assume that humans are conscious since each of us evolved from the same beginnings and we ourselves are conscious, however if these new beings are fundamentally structured differently then the only way to truly know that they are conscious is to understand what (in depth) makes a human being conscious.