What Will They Be like? : Cells & Oxygen.

Again: the premise for this is--a). "they" are the agents originally responsible for the longterm path of technological evolution that produced, ultimately, the technology that comes for a visit; b). "they" therefore themselves had an evolutionary history of some kind in this physical universe; c). all manner of "other things" might imaginably show up and be observed, but these few posts are not about spirits, magonians, robots, tenth-dimensional unknowables, etal. In order to see what science might be able to see, I'm going to look at the most conservative "platform" for discussing possible ET life and intelligence: the evolved organism that the physical universe would produce "on its own". This brings the largest amount of current knowledge into play, and is arguably the most likely thing to happen in terms of physical visitation anyway. The diagrams on the left represents a visual simplicity of the general scientific thinking about how life formed in the first place. The diagrams recognize certain felt requirements to that success happening against the forces that would rather break things up than let them form. Ilya Prigogine saw that life was a mystery--scientifically--because it flaunted thermodynamics. The trend of thermodynamics is to reduce the usefulness of energy and create less order. Life swam against this tide and became more complex and more "forceful". How? Prigogine realized that Life was a special system. It was "self-organizing" [it could re-form itself both in the "lifetime" of an individual--by repairs--and in a next "generation"]. It was also "unstable". It was capable of change without necessarily catastrophic termination. It could "mutate" and still live. If such a system [and this is the best definition of "life"] was in an environment full of challenges to its integrity, it would be regularly assaulted or "perturbed". Because such "perturbations" might alter the system without "killing" it, the system would put itself back together again. Sooner or later, in the trial and error process of self-reorganization the system would hit upon an addition to its nature which "dealt with" the constant perturbation. That "addition" would be an "advance". Life would, inevitably, become more complex. "Any Unstable Self-organizing System Will Inevitably Advance." So, evolution in the face of thermodynamics. What this has to do with evolved extraterrestrials is actually a lot. Such characters must have begun their long trip up the evolutionary scale as such systems. The earliest organisms must have had such qualities and environments that "perturbed" them but didn't automatically kill them. Life needed a dynamic exchanging environment and the ability to shield and moderate that environment. Pure raw exposure is a hard way to try to go. Thus: cells...or sacs...or some

containment that has the property of protecting but not sealing off...permeability...transfer. The diagrams show one schema for creating such a system. Although it is possible that somewhat different chemicals might be used than our own honored amino acids [to make proteins], something like proteins must be involved. This is because it is the type of bonding that the amino acids have that leads not only to long complicated molecules, but molecules with an almost unlimited number of micro-shapes, and consequent chemical powers. They are the only known set of simple chemical structures that are composed of stuff the universe readily makes [remember the stuff in the meteorites] and will give life this powerful diversity of chemistry to choose from. I'd not be stunned that we could sit down with our galactic friends and eat a common meal, rich in mutually digestible proteins. Hopefully we would not decide to graze on one another. Much more, much, much more, could be said of this but this is boring chemistry to anyone but us chemists so lets try something else---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Once upon a time I was reading objections to UFO encounters as being "obviously false" and naturally my crap detectors went immediately up. One of the objections was that close encounters of the third kind were baloney because most of the critters had no masks or helmets, and. "given the great variety and divergence of life in the universe" they could not possibly be breathing our air. Such assertions were always followed by two things: 1). statements about possible "methane or ammonia" breathers [without the smallest scientific analysis of their "unlikely"-to say the least-b.s.], and 2). statements that Darwin's theory is on their side [which also turns out not to be true]. So, I decided to see if what they were saying made any sense. It doesn't. The following pages give the gist as to why not.



The article says something important beyond the "can they breathe our air?" question. It reminds us of what we know about technology. It does not spring from nowhere. Technology too evolves. If one cannot place ones thinking in a historical context [and see process and change] one can [I say will] jump to all sorts of erroneous, even preposterous "conclusions". An awareness of history IS actually worth ones time. In fact, if one understands history well enough, it is like taking a strong run at a barrier called "NOW" and bursting through and "seeing" at least a little way ahead. My goodness, history might even be "practical".