A hallucinogen is like a telescope. Many users of hallucinogens report meeting "machine elves". Maybe we should be looking there.
That's like saying studying ambien will unlock the secrets to time travel.
The search for extraterrestrial life as we don’t know it
101–102 of 102 posts
Re: The search for extraterrestrial life as we don’t know it
#102I've always found the framework we use to search for extraterrestrial life to be too based on our own experience. It could take countless forms, most of which we could never recognize or understand, and might be present everywhere without us knowing. I'm glad that more of the science community is pushing to broaden our horizons.
I used to think that too. Life could be anything; crystals, pure energy, eddies in the superfluid cores of neutron stars, swimming in seas of metallic hydrogen in Jupiter's core, living clouds floating in Venus' upper atmosphere. The trouble is that when you start asking yourself about what the fundamental nature of life is, all the fun stuff starts to fall out. For life to be life, it needs to do work. You need a me…
I don't see how your argument refutes living clouds. Hurricanes, after all, are self-organized heat engines, a proto-life that is hampered on Earth by very marginal conditions and that pesky dry land.
On gas giants, the conditions are much better for sustainable 'life' of long-lived cyclones, you can see huge amounts of them on Jupiter an Saturn, even very long-lived ones (hello The Great Red Spot). Instances of these cyclones merging with ('eating') each other are well-documented.
Yes, they work on very different scales (both space- and time-) then us, and might have problems reaching high-intelligence in reasonable time, but I see no reason a long-lived giant cyclonic storm can't match the complexity of small bacteria. In the environment they 'live' they would interact with similar 'life' on a continuous basis and the more successful ones would survive and might even 'evolve' in a Darwinian fashion.
This shows that the chemistry-based arguments are way too limiting.
Of course, stars themselves are a prime example of self-sustaining energy-extraction 'life', again, absolutely without the need for chemistry - there the problem is that the meaningful interaction with the outside environment is rather limited (on the star's scale) so it would be more difficult to 'evolve'. I would still like to see self-sustaining solitons of magnetic energy thriving in/on the stars, competeing with each other (and their interactions/fights ending up in solar flares), but I am not sure such things can work (unlike hurricanes, that definitely work).