Ok now all I can think of is some old scfi the aliens had a book called How to Serve Humans turned out to be a cook book. Cant remember the title it may have even been black and white. Funny what sticks in the mind

The hubris of man knows no limit. Why it's instantly assumed that aliens would have the same foundational technologies as we do is sheer arrogance.

What about an intelligent race that arises on a planet that's absent abundant resources in metals and carbon fuels? They'd adapt and develop technologies based on what they have available and the markers of those technologies would end up being considerably different from our own.

Silly, narrow-minded people with no imagination come up with this crap.

Google is your friend...

Story written by Damon Knight, one of my favourites, brought to life by... The Twilight Zone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_M ... ht_Zone%29

In a spoof of the 1950s short story To Serve Man, The Simpsons are in their backyard having a barbecue when they are abducted by extraterrestrial life forms (specifically Kang and Kodos). The aliens explain that they are taking the Simpsons to their home planet on Rigel IV, "a world of infinite delights," for a 'feast'. En route they present the family with enormous amounts of food and watch eagerly as they gorge themselves, then check their weights, being particularly delighted at Homer's mass.

Suspicious of the alien's intentions, Lisa sneaks into the kitchen and finds a book titled How To Cook Humans. She takes the book and shows it to the aliens, who explain to her that part of the title was obscured by space dust, which they then blow away to reveal the title How To Cook For Humans. Lisa, skeptical at this, blows off more space dust, revealing the title to be How To Cook Forty Humans. The aliens blow off the last of the space dust, finally revealing the real title How To Cook For Forty Humans. Enraged at Lisa's distrust, they return the Simpsons to Earth, explaining that Lisa ruined the family's chance at paradise on the aliens' home planet.

Hubris? They might be mistaken, but calling it hubris is a little over the top. It makes sense that technology might be similar based upon the Science modern technology is based. If there is consistency in Physics, there are a limited amount of ways Electricity can be produced, for eg.

The way Knowledge is acquired is also likely similar. That being that an Intelligent species would start with simple concepts then build upon them over time. I suppose a species could discover certain technologies, like burning fuels for Electricity generation, yet not implement that on a large scale for whatever reason. Then with the discovery of Solar/Wind/or other non-polluting Electricity generation they implement that technology for mass production of Electricity. Thus avoiding the Pollution we might be looking for.

We are the only example of an Advance Technological species we Know. It simply makes sense to look for what our affect is until we find something different. Now if we found an advanced species whose history had no Pollution or very different Pollution and we chose to ignore that and only look for planets affected the way we have affected Earth, that would be Hubris.

Why do you assume that every other technologically advanced species would use electricity? Maybe they'd use something else that we've never thought of.

As far as how they'd generate power if they had few carbon fuels then what if they had plentiful helium isotopes? We'd not detect their activities if this was the case.

It's the arrogance of anthropomorphism to expect that all other intelligent life has to be just like us.

Electricity is fairly simple Physics. Thus it will be available everywhere.

For an alien species to have advanced through similar stages as humans, it would require a planet very, very similar to Earth and a species very, very similar to humans.

The odds of said alien species even being similar to humans are slim enough. The odds of them originating from a planet very, very similar to Earth, as well, are even slimmer.

Uh-huh. And on a planet that is not rich in metals how would you harness electricity? You wouldn't. And on such a planet any intelligent life would end up developing technologies that don't employ electricity.

Frankly, we may be the oddities in the universe because of our selection of technologies.

It would not surpise me in the least if someone showed up on earth someday and asked us why we didn't use readily available and plentiful (?) as an energy source. And then we'll do a collective facepalm and wonder at how stupid we've been.

Technologies that don't employ Electricity? I find that highly doubtful. At least in the sense it was never used. Especially when Electricity is as obvious as it is. People have been aware of it since Ancient times, although they didn't understand what it was.

I'm sure that if other intelligent species exist elsewhere they could show us many things. Likely things we have an inkling of, say Cold Fusion, rather than things we have no clue about. Some things will make us facepalm at ourselves, perhaps, regardless, it is still neither hubris nor arrogance for us to look for what we know are signs of Intelligent Life.

It's likely as time passes and so does our technology along with how that affects the environment we will find new things to look for. It's pointless to just throw our hands up in the air and cry "Hubris" and "Arrogance" and not bother looking at all.

Electricity is not obvious, only the (most common) effects of an electrical current or high voltage ionisation are.

On a world where these effects are not demonstrable, it would have to be discovered by means alien to us. Therefore it is arrogance to assume otherwise.