"Researchers who explore the possibility of microbial life beyond Earth, the different chemistries and microscopic structures that could give rise to life, do so with a practical eye. Their work can offer search parameters to astronomers pointing increasingly sensitive telescopes at planets beyond our solar system, with the chance to detect signs of life — not to mention for researchers designing probes to visit Mars and the possibly habitable moons of the outer solar system. Far fewer scientists spend time thinking about the possible forms of complex life, not just cells that use energy and hold information in DNA or its analogue, but the analogue of animals, the analogue of us.
Aside from the lack of applications for such thought experiments, there just aren’t enough constraints to call that speculation science. Astrophysicist Adam Frank told me, “If you want to use the constraints that science gives you to try and say something about life, then you’re limited to things that are super simple and things that are as complicated as we are.” Frank’s research includes modeling alien civilizations — he prefers the term “exocivilizations,” to match “exoplants” — as agents of climate change. Any technological civilization will necessarily have an impact on the energy balance of its home planet. So we can model that, and we can model exotic cell chemistries, but anywhere in between those two extremes is impossibly murky. At least for science...
This isn’t about policing pop culture for scientific accuracy, of course. (That would be a very bad way to do science outreach.) (That last parenthetical was a direct address to Neil deGrasse Tyson.)"
Related: Dolphins as aliens one; NDT one
FB: "All of our imaginings are inherently incredibly limited. It’s like trying to imagine a new color or a new sense. Our frame of reference is what scientists call n=1, one example to extrapolate from: one sentient species, one planet, one evolutionary tree. Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, told me, “We always extrapolate from what we are to what we figure they are. It’s a little bit self-centered.” Moreover, it misses the point. “If you think about it, the most important thing we’re doing in this century is inventing our successors.” What Shostak means by that is intelligent machines. Far less romantic to commune with than big-eyed ET."
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