Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Looking in the Wrong Places

The error we humans make in seeking intelligent life beyond our planet Earth is: (1) we're looking for the wrong sort of thing, and (2) we're looking in the wrong places.

No matter how odd our typical alien appears, they all look like us, i.e., they are anthropomorphic. Even the most bizarre creatures of our movie producers' imagination are anthropomorphized.

They are self-contained, i.e., they have a body, head, limbs, sometimes tails (we humans once had one and still have its vestigial remnant), eyes, usually two, and in the front of their heads, a mouth, often with very scary teeth, and many of the other characteristics common to the human.

Like God, we have created extraterrestrial beings in our own self image.

Given that we have creatures on earth that in no way resemble us, not even in the sense that they have characteristics similar to our own, we should be able to open our minds and consider other forms of extraterrestrial intelligence.

The jellyfish has no brain, no blood, no eyes, no central
nervous system, and some effectively live forever.

Let us suppose, for example, that what we are looking for in the way of extraterrestrial intelligence takes the form of a bacteria. Something called "cyanobacteria" is probably responsible for our very existence. Cyanobacteria somehow showed up on our planet some 3.5 billion years ago and started the process of terra forming (I've written about this elsewhere).

Was this a random cosmological accident, or are bacteria a distributed form of intelligence that travels throughout the cosmos creating the conditions for its own existence, communicating, like our jellyfish, through a neural network like none we've ever conceived?

An artist's impression of the super earth world Gliese 667 Cc.

This brings me to my second point. Recently, a very specialized instrument operated at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has been dedicated to searching for "exoplanets," that is, planets outside our solar system, that have characteristics similar to our own earth. The High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) is an echelle spectrograph fed by fibers from the telescope in La Silla. The whole idea is to identify and hopefully explore planets similar to earth with the hope of finding intelligent life like our own.

But aren't we constraining our exploration by limiting our search to planets? We have no reason to believe that the cyanobacteria that made its way to earth is constrained to a single planet. Maybe the extraterrestrial intelligence we seek is integral to the universe as a whole. Maybe we exist as an infinitesimal part of the whole; an afterthought of a superior intelligence migrating throughout the cosmos in a never ending quest to find an intelligence like its own. And we aren't it.

Intelligent Life, Revisited

In an earlier post I discussed terrestrial organisms, i.e., life forms on earth, living in extremely hostile environments. Our conception of where life can exist has been expanded dramatically as a result of deep sea explorations, for example, where scientists were astounded to discover giant tube worms thriving at 8000 ft at hydrothermal vents leaking scalding, acidic water. It would seem then, that extraterrestrial life becomes even more probable, because the conditions under which life can survive and even thrive have widened considerably.

Yet, when we consider the possibility of extraterrestrial life, we seem invariably to conceptualize only in terms of the self-contained organism; what I term the 'ET paradigm.'

But what if intelligent life was organized differently? What if it looked like the image below instead? This is an immunoflourescent image of a neisseria microcolony and its radiating pili. Neisseria gonorrhoeae is the bacterium that causes the infectious disease gonorrhea. Scientific studies are showing how bacteria like neisseria crawl to and exchange genes with each other. Other studies are investigating how some microbes got here to earth in the first place. Got here and perhaps, planted in and/or exchanged genes with us.

Humans are covered inside and out with bacteria. We depend on bacteria for essential functions, like digestion. Bacterial cells outnumber human cells by 10 to 1 and microbiologists believe that humans and their commensal, i.e., symbiotic, bacteria are continually adapting to one another genetically. In some sense, we humans are a kind of superstructure for a microbial colony. But that's not really what I mean to convey. I see humans as an integral part of an organic membrane that stretches across the universe, from one end to another in space-time. I'll say more about this later, when I discuss space traveling bacteria.