I take your answer to the question then to be "yes." Is that correct? You equate "intelligence" with any organism's guidance system.
I, of course, mean higher "intelligence," whatever definition that incorporates the intelligence of humans -- ability to reason, foresee consequences, plan, build, love, emot and control emot, etc......so many aspects that it's difficult to capture. Let's just call it human or higher as if on a scale. Let's also assume that human intelligence is the highest expression of intelligence on this earth based on the human's dominant status.
Do I understand you, then, to be saying that such "higher" or greater than "higher" exists elsewhere in the universe as a probability statement?
Not guidance but control. Humans have a faulty control system in that instincts are fuzzy and a great deal of learning is required to permit humans to function in society. Because virtually everything a man requires must be learned the likelihood of error is high. This leads to diversity and divisiveness. Men fight a never ending battle to correct the errors that they believe plague their fellows. Rarely do they seek to correct their own mistakes with equal fervor. This unhappy state of affairs is little different from the sort of conflicts wandering tribes of baboons are wont to engage in.
The point is that intelligence of the human sort is merely a trait. It will eventually be surpassed in every respect by machines of our own making. We are humans which means we have big brains that learn and remember. Men still behave exactly like animals that rely for the most part on instinct.
" Let's also assume that human intelligence is the highest expression of intelligence on this earth based on the human's dominant status." -- xzins
We like to think of ourselves as dominant because of our ability to muck things up for the other life forms. Most often our intelligence is used in a most trivial way as we struggle for survival within a system that is already programmed to ensure our demise. This is not a "higher" intelligence. It is merely the exercise of accumulated knowledge by a system external to ourselves and devoid of intelligence. Governments, for example, are collectives that make slaves of us all and destroy the capacity for intelligence because they wield power beyond the natural abilities of the few men employed to control them. In fact most men in the service of these beasts take all their orders without hesitation or reflection from a book of rules. Many, if not most, of these rules are bad and have only an evil effect but they are enforced nonetheless.
Individual men living in natural settings without an external source of accumulated knowledge would not appear dominant in any sense. If men had to start over completely from scratch (i.e., no language, no tools, no training) they would immediately go extinct. So it is a mistake to confuse the society of men with men as individuals for whom the large brain is utterly useless unless filled with practical knowledge.
"Do I understand you, then, to be saying that such "higher" or greater than "higher" exists elsewhere in the universe as a probability statement?" -- xzins
What I said previously was that life may be rare but intelligence is common where the life we know of is found. Unfortunately, a sample size of one means that numerical probability cannot be calculated for the existence of life elsewhere in the cosmos. On the other hand, for the existence of intelligence where life is found we must currently estimate that probability as equal to one but with zero confidence. We can really only say that life is possible (here it is) and that intelligence is a very common trait of living things on the one planet we have studied so far.