Is there a systemic search for this kind of crazy stuff, and where are the review papers for them? I don't know the keywords!
There's already a whole world of terrestrial microbes that we expect or even know for certain to exist but can't culture, let alone stain, which means we can't really study them. We'd (theoretically) eventually notice them on electron microscopy slides though, which is how we know there's many unculturable microbes, but whether we'd recognize them as alien is a completely different matter. The microbial world is very diverse and there's nothing I can think of that'd set something apart as alien since we can analyze the chemistry with an electron microscope.
That sounds pretty cool for a hobbyist to potentially spend time on. Anything you could recommend to look at, for following up on this unknown stuff?
I'm going to bookmark this for the case someone asks: what piece of information that seems basic did you ignore until very recently?
A question that often arises is: if current life evolved from chemistry that's simpler than DNA, why has that one disappeared? Maybe it hasn't.
If someone told me that we know more about space then our own oceans I wouldn't be surprised.
IIRC octopuses appeared in the Jurassic era by which time 'brains' were well established amongst our ancestors, notably the earliest proto-mammals.
I agree that they are an interesting form of alternative intelligence and parallel evolution, but biochemically they have numerous things in common with us, including many gene systems that are highly conserved across a variety of different clades, including our own.
> Life on Earth... but not as we know it
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/apr/14/shadow-biosp...
Also TIL giant viruses have their own Stargates[2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandoravirus
[2] https://www.livescience.com/triggers-for-giant-virus-infecti...
Sure, they can still be very interesting from the bio/chemistry point of view. But it's the advanced civilizations that we're really after.
https://adamierymenko.com/titan/
In this I’m at least speculating that Titan might be likely to host alien life in its steamy cryotropical environment. I’d love to see NASA sink a submersible in those methane seas and look for cryowhales. (Or more likely cryobacteria but cryowhales would rule.)
I’d expect life there to be wholly biochemically alien, probably based on methane or ammonia as solvents, and probably very metabolically “slow” compared to most life here. We might miss even macroscopic Titan life without time lapse photography.
To any intelligent Titanians we would look like the Balrogs from Lord of the Rings: burning lava monsters with blood of molten water.
Their form is pretty good for survival on Earth, we don't know if they're good forms for survival elsewhere or in general.
There is also this to consider: limits of our own imagination/ comprehension.
If we are like microbes swimming inside a droplet of water, we won't be able to imagine/ comprehend / detect beings of the scale of say flies.
Our mental abilities may also be limited in similar ways. I think that puts a limit on what we can perceive / detect / understand.
We need some way of prioritizing the search work and for that purpose looking first for life as we know it makes sense as that is where we are most likely to be able to identify life.
If searching for life as we know it does not produce results then of course it makes sense to broaden the search. But that is more relevant debate for our children than for us.
Humans are closer to fungi than rocks are to life.
Life inside of stars does enable different options.
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 metabolism. You need to "do stuff". The only way to do work ("work" in the physics sense) is to leverage an energy gradient; you need to have hot/cold, high/low pressure, bright/dark, high/low salt concentrations, high/low energy chemicals, positive/negative charge, etc. And you need to extract work from the differences between them. Therefore, you need to have a physical barrier between your high/low energy states; if you didn't, the system would reach equilibrium without you. So you need a physical barrier, it has to be a solid or liquid: you've eliminated your beings of pure energy, superfluid eddies, living clouds.
It's all well and good to use whatever weird energy gradient you want, but most energy gradients are simply too inconvenient; if you want to get energy, chemistry is ultimately going to be the only one that works. It's fine for plants to break water molecules with relatively high energy photons, but you can't build complicated structures with light. You need chemistry. And for chemistry you need to be in the liquid phase. So you've eliminated your crystal based life.
So everything is chemicals with complex structures in a liquid. It doesn't have to be proteins constructed with amino acids, it doesn't have to be ribosomes constructed from RNA, but you need some sort of 'interesting' chemical. How do you build interesting chemicals? Well you have to use carbon. You have to use carbon, no other element fits the bill. The metals are right out; they only form metallic bonds and ionic bonds which are non-structural. The noble gases are out because they don't do chemistry. The halogens are out because they can form just the one covalent bond. The chalcogens (oxygen, sulfur, etc) are also out for the same reason; with only two covalent bonding points you can form chains and rings, but not a branching structure. Nitrogen is too happy to form a triple bond with itself, producing a gas, so basically all molecules with lots of nitrogen atoms are explosive. Phosphorus is a decent candidate, but its chemistry is very finicky. Carbon is great, because it forms 4 covalent bonds that are not too strong and not too weak. Silicon is ... ok? But it cannot form double bonds, it tends to form weak bonds, and is unstable in most chemistries.
So life has to be carbon based. This puts an upper limit on temperatures, because interesting carbon chemistry breaks down at high temperatures. Venus is out, the depths of Jupiter are out.
So we're looking at other solvents besides water. Methane is a great candidate, and as a result lots of people are clamoring to get a Titan mission going. Ammonia is something people talk about, but it's unlikely to be able to form ponds or oceans on a world; it's probably going to break down into methane and molecular nitrogen, because again, carbon rules. But if we detected a large amount of ammonia in the spectra of a planet that could maintain temperatures consistent with liquid ammonia, you could bet that everyone is going to clamoring to study it in detail.
So what are we looking at? Carbon based life on planets with liquid oceans. Which is basically the same as us. We haven't gotten here because we're biased towards what we're like, we've gotten here by starting from first principals, considered everything, and eliminated the things which are impossible.
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).
(In the same way we recognize language vs random noise even if we can't understand it.)
I'm so glad someone is thinking about this and that that person sounds like a broad thinker!
What we're primarily interested in is detecting tecnological life. At stellar distances this really means detecting evidence of spacefaring civilization. This means practially the same thing because the gap between initial technology and spacefaring technology is a cosmic blink of an eye.
And those signatures will transcend biochemistry and what type of world you originate on barring some major glaring error in our understanding of physics (eg thermodynamics being violated).
The reason is that life will ultimately come down to energy and mass. Both of these mean there is pressure to expand and to expand is to become visible. You can argue that expansion isn't inevitable in all cases and you might be correct but it doesn't matter. It matters only if all civilizations remain small and/or hidden. And the odds of that go down as the number of civilizations go up.
I am of course talking about Dyson Swarms, a cloud of orbitals around a star. To put this in perspective, a full Dyson Swarm around our Sun would give each of the 8 billion people on EArth living area roughly equivalent in size to Africa and each person would have a million times more energy than the entire of humanity currently uses.
Such megastructures would be very obvious from a great distance too (ie due to the IR signature of dissipating heat). Likewise, there would be no hiding from such a civilization.
JWST would be able to detect an oxygen rich atmosphere like ours, which is a sure sign of life. Oxygen rich atmospheres are not a stable equilibrium; without all the plants and plankton on Earth, the oxygen in the atmosphere would all recombine, and Earth would be left with an atmosphere with no oxygen but additional CO2.
Atmospheres can either be CO2 rich or methane rich; they can't have significant amounts of both CO2 and methane. They don't exist in equilibrium; either a planet will preferentially convert CO2 to methane or methane to CO2, and there won't be any left of the other.
There are a handful of other atmospheric biosignatures that JWST can detect. Chemical compositions that are a sure sign of life; chemical signatures that are conclusive or strong indicators that life is present, even if we can't classify or describe it. Classifying exoplanets' atmospheres is a primary mission goal of JWST; it's what it's designed to do, and it's doing it right now.
Chemical changes to our atmosphere might be detectable from afar.
Changes that are not geological, like Earth's great oxygenation event could be vivid enough to be detectable among exoplanets.
The building blocks are extremely common, they seem to have fairly broad initial conditions, and it seems like they are practically inevitable once those conditions exist.
Given that we have exactly one occurrence of Origin of Life, how did you conclude this? From life originating quickly on Earth once it had cooled enough? That could be explained by the conditions in which life might originate not persisting for very long after a planet forms.
We seem to find amino acids everywhere. It seems like once conditions exist that they can form, they DO form.
We don't have any equivalent building block which is anywhere nearly so ubiquitous.
In addition, these building blocks are reversible within 3kcal/mol. Life requires reversibility. http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2008/10/unbearable-he...
We have no other building blocks with this kind of versatility. None.
So, life may not be based on DNA/RNA, but it's almost certain to be based around amino acids.
Is it more effective to search for phenotypical effects of life than life itself?
Do we care about life elsewhere unless it as advanced or more advanced than us?
Even if we could find in “space”, can we find it in “time”?
That time was an honest mistake, but maybe we should stop trying to play God for a while. At least until we are advanced enough to create our own universe to experiment with.
yeah, but once people worked out how it was killing the natives they went a more systematic route.
Sorry.
Many users of hallucinogens report meeting "machine elves".
Maybe we should be looking there.
i am plenty familiar with them and other characters, and their lessons always seemed terrestrial, subconsciously familiar.
Well I've talked to them a bit too and I think there's somebody there.
Other significant efforts searching for alien life include the Galileo Project by Dr. Avi Loeb of Harvard https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galileo/home
Edit: For those who don't know, the 2022 NDAA was passed that included legislation the protect whistleblowers from disclosing to congress about unacknowledged black projects regarding reverse engineering programs that congress was not privy to. https://douglasjohnson.ghost.io/uap-related-provisions-of-th...
> ESTABLISHMENT.—The Secretary of Defense, acting through the head of the Office and in consultation with the Director of National Intelligence, shall establish a secure mechanism for authorized reporting of— (A) any event relating to unidentified anomalous phe- nomena; and (B) any activity or program by a department or agency of the Federal Government or a contractor of such a depart- ment or agency relating to unidentified anomalous phe- nomena, including with respect to material retrieval, mate- rial analysis, reverse engineering, research and develop- ment, detection and tracking, developmental or operational testing, and security protections and enforcement.
<yawn> Pushing for disclosure is very different than there being anything to disclose. Get back to me when they actually disclose anything worthy of being attributed to non-human intelligence.
Also, I think "disclosure" is somewhat of a misnomer. If people don’t know what it is, there’s nothing to disclose. People have been beating the disclosure drum for years. Nothing really has happened except some people made a bit of money selling people on the idea.
And for all intents and purposes, our world-spanning civilization is much too primitive to even begin to disclose something like this if it were true. 85% of the people on this planet believe in superstitious nonsense. We aren’t ready to accept the existence of aliens on other worlds or parallel universes, let alone accept our own brothers and sisters who have a different skin color.
Given what I’ve seen of humanity, the zoo hypothesis is the best thing we can hope for. We just are incredibly stupid as a species at this time and place. I can’t imagine why any alien would want to have anything to do with us.
<<We surmise, that in the solar region there are inhabitants which are more solar, brilliant, illustrious, and intellectual—being even more spiritlike than [those] on the moon, where [the inhabitants] are more moonlike, and than [those] on the earth, [where they are] more material and more solidified . . . We believe this on the basis of the fiery influence of the sun and on the basis of the watery and aerial influence of the moon and the weighty material influence of the earth. In like manner, we surmise that none of the other regions of the stars are empty of inhabitants—as if there were as many particular mondial parts of the one universe as there are stars, of which there is no number.>>"
https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/what-can-catholic-...
Former Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon.
Dr. Avi Loebb - Astrophysicist at Harvard.
Dr. Gary Nolan - Pathologist at Stanford
I know it's a bit tongue-in-cheek but I kinda wish they'd go with something more realistic that also explains our perspective, something like "when two organisms feel compelled to have sex". Even in humans it's a big stretch to say that deep love is a prerequisite and I think adds some harmful personification to the natural world