weirdsciences.net

When considering the presence of life under adversity, we shouldn’t be too quick to rule out environments based solely on extreme properties. The underwater hydrothermal vents are very hostile places as judged by life on or near Earth’s surface, yet life manages to thrive around them under conditions quite unlike anything at the surface. Undersea volcanic activity spills forth scalding-hot water rich in sulfur and poor in oxygen that manages to feed “extremeophilic” life by a process known as chemosynthesis—an analog of photosynthesis, yet one that operates in total darkness.

This is not to say that intelligence could not arise from plants or fungi– just that the development period for such would seem to be far longer than that already postulated for sealife in general, and so intelligence of too high a plant or fungi content would virtually always lose the survival competition on a given world to more robust and mobile animal forms, under most imaginable conditions.

“Aliens may exist but contact would hurt”, said Hawking. Despite being one of the fan of Hawking, I refute his speculation. After writing tons of articles on alien life I can finally conclude that poor Hawking is wrong. Hawking says that such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach. But my contention with his argument is that why would aliens eradicate us? Perhaps they want food or want to steal our technology?

One of the tremendous advantages of interstellar probes over interstellar beacons in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is that probes may serve as cosmic “safety deposit boxes” for the cultural treasures of a long-perished civilization. The gold-anodized Voyager records are a primitive attempt to achieve just this sort of cultural immortality . Starfaring self-replicating machines should be especially capable of maintaining themselves against the disordering effects of long periods of time, hence SRS will be preferentially selected for survival over nonreproducing systems.

Maybe they merely want us as slaves? Or pets? Again, they could more easily and cheaply produce us at their own home planet for such purposes, than they could to come all the way here to capture us in large numbers fully grown, and then transport us back again.