Alien Life
Day 4 of Five Stories in Five Days
One of the great debates among experts and laypeople interested in the question of alien life is whether such life would take a form recognizable to us or be something so utterly foreign that our brains would not even be able to process what we were seeing. Throughout history, humans beings have, for various reasons, proved fantastically awful at imagining alien beings. In more primitive times, people envisioned celestial visitors who looked like enhanced, angelic (or demonic) versions of us, and the tendency to portray aliens as humanoid—with four limbs, one head, orthograde posture, and bilateral symmetry—had persisted over the years. For TV shows and movies portraying aliens, other considerations like budgetary costs kept filmmakers loyal to humanoid designs. And even when people tried to imagine aliens that didn’t follow a humanoid paradigm, they still modeled their imaginary creatures after life on our planet, Frankensteining together parts from disparate creatures to create fantastic chimera that, if considered for too long, would reveal themselves to possess ridiculously impossible biologies.
Impossible? Before we even consider imaginary alien life, look at a mythological creature like a centaur: half human, half horse. If you stare long enough at a centaur’s body, though, you immediately notice that both the human half and the equine half of the centaur have abdomens. Does a centaur therefore have one set of human intestines and one set of horse intestines? Does a centaur have two stomachs? Are these disparate gastric systems connected, and if so, how?
Psychologists and others claim that the creation of fanciful creatures can come only from collective human experience. A bat-winged demon gets its horns from the bovines, its legs from the caprines, its wings from the chiropterans, and its upper body from humans. Look at griffins and mermaids and Cthulhu and dragons—all composed of body parts that humans have encountered. There is no body part on these creatures that is utterly new or heretofore unimagined—nothing totally original. Tails, horns, tentacles, claws, stingers, scales, feathers, tongues, necks, spines, wings, eyes of different shapes: These are all part of the collective human experience. Humanity, some argue, simply cannot envision the alien life we will eventually find, and even as we learn more about the shapes terrestrial life can take and how intelligence can manifest itself (central brain, dispersed ganglia, distributed collectivity), these encounters with terrestrial life forms merely leave us mired in, for lack of a better word, Earthlife as the only template we know. We are, according to one school of thought, utterly unprepared for whatever awaits us out in the cosmos.
But another school of thought argues rather strongly that, while something like closely parallel evolution is, statistically speaking, nearly impossible (e.g., Kryptonians who evolve to look exactly like humans to the point of being able to breed with them), it is nevertheless likely that life on other worlds will evolve into bodily forms and types of intelligence that we will easily recognize because these aliens’ bodies will be the product of both the hand of evolution and the brutal necessities of problem-solving, necessities that give rise to intelligence as a means to survive and reproduce. If there is only one reality, then that reality can be navigated in only a certain number of ways since physical laws are the same everywhere, and problems that occur on one world will be similar to problems found on another, which means life on different worlds will evolve similar or overlapping shapes, strategies, and solutions in response to the myriad pressures helping to give rise to that evolution. According to this school of thought, whatever life we do finally encounter across the stars (or in our own solar system!) will definitely be recognizable as life.
But as we search for extraterrestrial life and intelligence, we might have to do away with many of our chauvinisms and prejudices. We often assume, for example, that life could arrive at our planet via spacecraft of recognizable size, but not orders of magnitude larger or smaller than our own spacecraft. We also often assume that alien life, when we encounter it, will come in the form of alien beings of roughly the same size as us, whatever shape they might take. We assume these beings will appear as individuals, convenient collections of cells guided by a centralized intelligence, probably following some sort of primate-style dominance hierarchy that offers a hint as to the nature of the aliens’ command structure or society. But what self-inflated arrogance makes us think we can assume the existence of notions like command structure and society outside of our world?
Ultimately, which school of thought wins in the end? The Alien Life Will Be Utterly New and Unrecognizable school, or the Alien Life Will Definitely Have Recognizable Traits school? Or is there some compromise between these schools of thought that hasn’t been considered? Or is there simply a third school of thought out there that we haven’t even imagined yet, compromise or not?
Between Unrecognizable and Recognizable, I personally lean more toward Recognizable. This opinion just comes from my own intuition, not from any arcane knowledge of conspiracy theories that happen to be true. I say this as I stare through the glass of an aquarium tank, inside of which sits Harry Potter, one of my lab’s several octopi (sure, use whatever plural you want—octopuses, octopodes, etc.). Harry is, in many ways, an alien. It’s almost a cliché, these days, to say that about octopi, which are extremely intelligent, extremely dexterous, gifted with fantastic memory, and apparently quite emotional, which almost makes one wonder whether they have rich inner lives. Do they imagine? Dream? Reason out implications? Are they a singular, unified intelligence or a central mind biologically housed with mostly independent-yet-networked arm-brains—a cacophony of not-quite-hierarchical consciousnesses? Scientists have lately seen evidence that octopi, which are normally fairly solitary, have begun to form communities, almost as if the survival strategies of passing knowledge generationally and acting cooperatively have become yet more of their evolved traits. Do octopi really bequeath their wisdom to future generations? How? With what language (or whatever passes for “language” among those mollusks… maybe subtle patterns in the ink they shoot out, like in Arrival?)?
Harry Potter, sitting innocently in his tank, pulls my intuition toward the Recognizable camp because as I ponder, for example, the possibility of life on Europa—Jupiter’s smallest Galilean moon with a world-spanning, ice-covered ocean—I have to think that, if aquatic creatures were to evolve there, those creatures would have to develop strategies for moving through and surviving in water. Within certain temperature and pressure ranges, after all, water is just water—the same throughout the cosmos. And if many creatures have been evolving within Europa’s immense subsurface ocean, intelligence of some sort would have had to evolve as well as a way not to be eaten, and as a way to hunt and eat and hide and breed and engage in group cooperation and symbiotically mutualistic behavior. So Harry Potter, our own terrestrial alien, pulls me in the direction of the Recognizable camp. I think we’ll know aliens when we see them.
But there’s one thing that’s always puzzled me about Harry and his entire Octopoda order: How the hell did Harry and the rest of his gang evolve such sharply complex intelligence despite being cursed with such short life spans? Short life spans might be conducive, over generations, to the development of the ability to sense and manipulate and learn quickly, but layered, scaffolded, complex intelligence develops—as far as we know—only when organisms enjoy relatively long lifespans. Most octopi live only from a few months to about half a decade. So how on Earth did the octopus’s combination of intelligent traits even evolve?
I look at Harry. How on Earth… how on… Earth…
What exactly happened in the Jurassic Period, when octopi first appeared? Was there a cosmic intervention? A quiet insertion of the octopus into the panoply of Earthlife by an intelligence that had designed it to look like part of our planet’s evolutionary continuum, to fit in with squids and another invertebrates? If so, why had this been done? Had this insertion been done in anticipation of the arrival of humans (or some sapient species), and are humans supposed to unlock something about octopi? If yes, then after the unlocking, what happens next?
Crazy thoughts. I shake my head and laugh at myself. I’ve just made the chauvinistic mistake of assuming octopi might have been waiting eons for humans to discover them. Mr. Spock warned us about human arrogance way back in Star Trek IV. Who knows? Maybe octopi are waiting for horses to evolve to the point where the two species can do something for—or about—the planet.
I can feel Harry Potter staring at me as I turn to leave the lab. Consistent with all of our catches, we had immediately sexed Harry to make sure he was in fact a he.
But I can’t shake the thought as I step out the door:
What if he is really an it?
I myself have asked, with wonder, this exact question about the demonstrated intelligence of octopi. Some species live only a single year, starting out the size of a bee and dying a year later of old age. In the interim they exhibit remarkable problem solving abilities and complex adaptive behaviors. My conclusion is that their brains work fundamentally differently from ours. Our brains are more software than hardware; we build up intricate neural networks by trial and error over years, even decades, in interaction with the natural world. Tabula rasa, but with enormous growth potential. Learned, not instinctive behavior. The octopus cannot be like that; there is no time. The only alternative is their sophisticated brains are more hardware than software. A lineage over 500 million years old, 10 times longer than primates, has enabled them to evolve behaviors that are learned in us, genetic and ingrained in them. They are hardwired with a sophisticated behavioral repertoire, instinctive, not learned, intellects. They have a fundamentally different architecture of mind. But it is a mind, and we have so much to learn of it.
Life is a local reversal of entropy. A vast plastic mass that fills the space available. Extinction is not forever. Speciation occurs wherever it's wanted. Adaptation is replication with fidelity and variation. Sensation is easy. Stored sensation slips in sentience. Learn then anticipate.
Man is born without genetic tools, but has the ability to create them. And lacks a preexisting script on how to use make tools.
Evolution moves sentience to sapience and “forward-memory." Man can replay actual memories, and even better, create possible scripts in the imagination.
Man is both highly cooperative and fiercely competitive. That allowed Man into every habitat on earth That alone also drove the expansion of imagination. Doesn’t take much power to find ripe fruit or avoid predators. Rather for Man, the great challenge was to anticipate the Other. Will they cooperate or cheat? How does Man detect, signal, keep the balance. Play the game Tit-for-Tat, the optimal game theory for such an uncertain world. And because we’ve played that game, for 500,000 years, there are no secrets in the real world, no true surprises.