What's to say we'd recognize "intelligent" life?

According to a report by the Associated Press, there may be or may have been life on Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons.

The possiblity arose when NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured images of "icy jets and giant water vapor plumes" near the moon's southern pole.

And, as Smokey the Bear would tell you, where there's water , there's life. Or something like that.

The AP report quickly quells the hopes of sci-fi fans , saying that "If Enceladus does harbor life, it probably consists of microbes or other primitive organisms capable of living in extreme conditions."

Read: There's no Klingons, killer Aliens, E.T.s or towel-carrying hitchhikers on Enceladus. There's no intelligent life for us to beam our satellite TV toward, hoping they'll get as hooked to American Idol as the rest of us.

But my question is: What's to say we'd recognize "intelligent" life on another planet?

Isn't our own consciousness nothing more than our own species's particular mode of survival, borne out of evolution like the rest of our traits?

Isn't our ability to "reflect" nothing more than a way of ordering what's just come to pass?

Isn't what's come to pass mostly the culmnination of irreversible momentum and instinctual reaction?

Consciousness, it seems to me, is the ordering of time. Time is the division of our life span into night and day and revolutions around the sun, our life-demanding source of energy. What if time works differently for other species? What if the interval between light in shade is longer or shorter for them?

Would we be able to communicate with them? Would we even be able to see them?

Our senses are not the limit of what is, they are only the most we can percieve with our understanding of time and space.

Considering these questions, who can even say, for example, that there is not even already "intelligent" life on this planet, beside our own.