Posted on Aug 20, 2018
“I’m not suggesting that long-lived objects like planets, stars, or galaxies are part of a cosmic organism (although it’s tempting to jump to that place for fun). Interesting things could be happening on much more modest physical scales. For example, could the messy chemistry we see in fossil fuels on Earth – a smorgasbord of organic reactions, a seemingly tarry chaos – be simply a short-term view of a living system that functions across hundreds of millions of years?”
Even though we still struggle with finding a satisfactory definition of life, that doesn’t mean that we can’t think about ways that life might be so different, so alien, that we would also struggle with noticing its existence, continues Caleb Scharf, Director of Astrobiology at Columbia University, in his Life Unbounded blog.
In the past, I’ve played around with this idea in a variety of ways. For example, considering life so different (or advanced) that its fundamental substrate is radically unlike ours. A suggestion that life could exist in dark matter made for great tabloid fodder. But the basic argument was, I think, an okay one: If dark matter has microstructure it could conceivably maintain the necessary complexity for living systems. And if dark matter does exist it must also constitute the majority of matter in the universe and therefore represents an awful lot of juicy real estate.
Similarly, what if complex, thinking biological life is fleeting on the cosmic scale but its machine progeny are more robust and more widespread? Such entities might also be very hard for us to recognize as such, either whizzing around at high velocities between the stars or massively encrypted in their fundamental design and their communication strategies.
Are there other forms of extreme alienness though? Qualities that would make life extremely hard for us to notice or understand?
I suspect that one characteristic might be to do with our perception of the passage of time. We are biased to be sensitive to a relatively narrow range of timescales for events. Even though we can build devices capable of operating with phenomena at the scale of femtoseconds (10-15 seconds) or even attoseconds (10-18 seconds), we’re nowhere near the theoretical limit of physically meaningful timescales at yoctoseconds (10-44 seconds).
At the other extreme, while we can gaze across 13.8 billion years of cosmic history, we’re very insensitive to slight shifts in phenomena that might operate across such a long period. While it’s true that we have limits on quantities like changes in the proton-to-electron mass ratio, which is seen to be steady across billions of years to at least one part in a million, we could be missing more subtle variations in this or other fundamental quantities. Admittedly a variation would be at odds with the Standard Model, but that model also doesn’t really justify the expected stability.
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Most Viewed Space & Science Headlines (2018)
The Alien Observatory –“When We see Something Unusual, That’s Out of Whack, It Can Be a Sign of Life”
Artificial Intelligence Is Already Out There, and It’s Billions of Years Old” (WATCH Video)
‘Ghost Signals’ of Extraterrestrial Civilizations Haunt the Milky Way –Suggests the New Drake Equation (WATCH Video)
“Odds That There has Never Been Another Civilization in the Universe One in Ten Billion Trillion” –A Joe Rogan Interview
Stephen Hawking’s Great Question –“Why Isn’t the Milky Way Crawling With Mechanical or Biological Life?”
The Alien Observatory –“The Mystery of Where Extraterrestrial Life is Hiding Deepens”
“We’re Entering Uncharted Territory” –The Exoplanet Revolution May Reveal that Rise of Civilizations May Not be Unusual
“The Big Rip” –When Matter and Spacetime are Gradually Torn Apart Through Expansion of the Universe
Alien Ocean Worlds–“There May be Life There, but Could It be Technology-Based”
“Humans are the First to Arrive at the Interstellar Stage” –Physicist Answers the Fermi Paradox
Image composition showing all the ESO observatories and the Headquarters.