Anticipating Our First Encounter with Advanced Extraterrestrial Life

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This blogger, Pericles21, let go of earth-focused restraints to muse on a recent web article on the subject of what we might expect when advanced extraterrestrial life is 'discovered': 'New Advances in the Search for Extraterrestrial Life --Will It Be Inconceivable to Us?, (DailyGalaxy, August 8, 2015).

First, 'when ET is discovered' is such an ego-centered frailty of humankind. For self-protection (i.e., to prevent arrogant, and dangerous, presumptions of our superiority), we should shift our frame from humans 'discovering' ET to a reality that, indeed, it is us humans that will be 'discovered'... by a far more advanced life-form. This reframing will be necessary since it is ET who will have the advanced technology to visit us while we will not have the technology to return the courtesy (as far as the public knows).

The Daily Galaxy begins by framing their article using earth as a reference point:

A thin layer near the surface of Earth is teeming with life of huge diversity: from micro-organisms to plants and animals, and even intelligent species. Up to now, this forms the only known sample of life in the Universe. We now readily accept that the laws and concepts of physics and chemistry apply throughout the cosmos. Is there a general biology as well: is there life beyond Earth?

With the Sun just about half-way through its life-time, humankind as we know it is likely to constitute a rather short transient episode, and advanced extra-terrestrial life might be inconceivable to us in its complexity, just as human life is to amoebae.

As the article points out, the wide range of biodiversity here on earth that produces new species 'discoveries' every year suggests we should be prepared for a surprise when we 'find' ET because ET will have had many-fold more time-cycles of their evolution to produce a hugely wider variation of ET life forms than we have on earth.

But to be balanced in perspective, there is the contra-diversity theory of "convergent evolution" championed by Simon Morris (The Runes Of Evolution)(2015) that posits ET will probably look like us at least in basic morphology (number of limbs, eyes, etc). Professor Morris makes the case for a:

ubiquitous "map of life" that governs the way in which all living things develop.
It builds on the established principle of convergent evolution, a widely-supported theory -- although one still disputed by some biologists -- that different species will independently evolve similar features.

Pericles21 partially, but significantly, disagrees with the 'convergent' view of evolution and posits an 'interpreted diversity of life' point of view that:

although advanced extraterrestrial life may evolve towards a similar morphology (shape), advanced ET life will likely show us an immense diversity of function and internal life-chemistry that will not necessarily be 'bio-organic' ... nor human in appearance.

This will be addressed later.

To help us prepare to meet diversity in ET life, we must adapt our understanding of what is life. This definition has to be 'Reductionist':

how do/can we identify the most simple, basic features that might describe what is 'life'.

Pericles21 posits that first, there should be 'containment', then 'form', an 'energy gathering-utilization mechanism' (e.g., bio-ingestion, radiation absorption, temperature/density gradient, etc), a charge transfer-based sensory network serving to operate a potential energy machine, an information/sentience system analogous in function to DNA, and a mechanism to assure longevity or survival of the sentient unit or community.

From these proposed principles of life, one hypothetical example of ET "life" might derive from the recently announced (DARPA project) nanoscale, Nernst-reversible, metallic-dendritic growth-retraction mechanism that looks to be a solid state analogy to bio-neuronic network components (axions). This suggests a model of low temperature, quasi-solid, metallic-based ET 'life' with cognitive reflexes thousands of times faster than the human brain.

Pericles21 champions a personal, entropic theory of shape that:

evolution is driven to minimize entropy, i.e., to take a shape that is the most streamlined (least entropy)

This least entropic state, this evolutionary 'end-point', may take the appearance of shapelessness, where the highest evolved morphology will appear to be a 'spherical or globular form. But so far, we can only muse about ET since we have only one publicly known data point of life in the universe, our own planet Earth. We will have to wait to expand on evolution until a second data point is discovered or revealed. Then our knowledge, and science, of life will take a 'quantum leap'.

Posted by: Resonanz | August 11, 2015 at 08:58 AM