I like both versions of, “The Thing,” although I prefer Howard Hawkes’ dialogue laden offering to John Carpenter’s gore-fest.

As an aside, has the word, “alien,” taken on a meaning synonymous with malevolence?

Cheers,

-cvj

Maybe it’s really not contradictory:
Maybe the higher you are on the evolutionary scale
the more detailed is your understanding of all of nature
so the more you care about what is going on at all levels, including lower ones.
(cf. “He marks the sparrows fall.”)

Tony Smith

This appealed to me when as a kid I first saw the film, a year after Chernobyl; when we’d all been taught about radiation in biology and the fact that the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans

‘which can survive 1.5 million rads of gamma irradiation–a dose 3,000 times the amount that would kill a human. This dose of radiation shreds the bacteria’s genome into hundreds of pieces.

‘The organism’s remarkable ability to repair this DNA damage completely in a day and go on living offers researchers clues to better understanding the mechanism of DNA repair. The Dept. of Energy (DOE), which funded the sequencing project, hopes to use the bacteria for the remediation of sites contaminated with radioactivity. Other DOE-funded researchers have modified D. radiodurans to be able to degrade the organic chemical contaminant toluene and “fix” or immobilize mercury while converting it to a more benign form. The engineered bacteria continue to survive in radioactive environments. … The microbe also withstands extreme desiccation and UV-irradiation. Since its discovery in 1956, D. radiodurans has been found around the world, usually in extreme conditions, ranging from the shielding pond of a radioactive cesium source to the surfaces of Arctic rocks. …’ - page here

Then it gets back to earth, where it has a terrible fondness for people’s blood. The bacteria finally get killed by rain washing them into the oceans, where the alkalinity of sea water (pH which they can’t survive.

No, I’d say that Spock was wrong in that one. They’re not that far ahead of us, really. They may have done a cool thing getting rid of their bodies, but they need more work on other areas in order to be more totally removed from humans, I’d say.

Cheers,

-cvj

When they ended a Klingon-Federation War, saying to Kirk and Kor the Klingon

“… Your emotions are most discordant. We do not wish to seem inhospitable, but, gentlemen, you must leave … The mere presence of beings like yourselves is intensely painful to us …
We have developed beyond the need for physical bodies. What you see is mere appearance for your sake. …”

Spock said about them

“… Fascinating. Pure energy, pure thought, totally incorporeal …
I should say the Organians are as far above us on the evolutionary scale as we are above the amoeba. …”.

Tony Smith

Who knows, maybe this is one way of disquising any contact? Interesting story line possibly?:) Just a thought.

If there was any contact, one would think that it would be very difficult for any mind to accept what it is seeing. So it behooves the mind to supplant alternatives with which one could cope and accept?

Is evolution the only model for complex life?

Evolution is a working model for adaptable populations. (Btw, heritable “adaptable populations” would be one practical definition of “life” whether seen as an ongoing process or more myopically as its localized parts of individual organisms.) Large-scale complexity isn’t guaranteed, and indeed most successful individuals are single-cell creatures.

I doubt large-scale processes would work. They would be unlikely to exist in the first place, but above all they would be unlikely to adapt and survive.

But if the life arose based on a different polymer chain and solvent .. or neither, like the particular dusty plasma configuration above, then it won’t be easily recognizable by us (and the the search for it correspondingly harder). See our cosmicvariance discussion), and the discussion by Robert Bradbury here:
http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/05/24/further-away-from-the-lamp-post/#comment-27279
about the Matrioshka_Brain idea, for example.

I had an excellent conversation over dinner with a visiting postdoc (Oliver Rosten) about this some time ago. We agreed that there might be limitations on how large such an organism can be (for a given amount of complexity) since it needs time to develop (but see below) and the universe has a finite lifetime.

Well, we got to arguing about the “time to develop” aspect, which came down to wondering about how an organism can get to be in the first place. Is evolution the only model for complex life? In other words, do we always need something complex to arise by evolving over many generations (so we need reproduction, sexual or otherwise), or can something complex enough “spontaneously” come to life, perhaps by some type of phase transition that we’ve yet to characterize. The latter would be nice (and could allow for really huge creatures), and interesting, but evolution seems to be the only working model we have for complex life (in which case we can almost certainly rule out complex living creatures the size of several solar systems)…. would be nice to think of other models besides evolution (staying away from invisible Creators that live outside the system, obviously), and find demonstrable examples. This then leads to the usual late night discussions about what life actually is….

Discuss.

-cvj

In one of the Dr Who episodes from last season, they borrowed (er, stole?) A.C. Clarke’s sun-dwelling plasma creature. I immediately thought of that when I saw that episode.

@Amara;

Truth is often stranger than fiction, eh? I like the ‘out of the box’ thinking that the ‘exobiologists’ are doing.

~ One thing I’ve never understood was how people immediately think aliens will be about the same size as us (ie perhaps a little shorter a la ET, but still capable of using our doorways etc). I understand the alternatives aren’t that great for movie-making but this is rather prevalent in sci-fi as well, and this annoyed me even as a little kid because we’ve had everything from squirrels to dinosaurs just on our own little planet. (My sister is in grad school for evolutionary biology, and we spent many happy childhood hours concluding that we’d never actually see visiting aliens because you’d need a microscope.)

~ Arthur C. Clarke was a master at making up exotic alien life forms. My favorite was how creatures could live in the outer layers of the Sun, as all you need is localized energy and information passed on to later generations. So he had these cool plasma-creatures which he described in fascinating detail… he also had gaseous life-forms that lived on Jupiter, but I can’t remember the details exactly.

This recent press release, describes a dusty plasma scenario that contains all of the features that one would normally attribute to organic life. It’s not a crank paper; the leading author is a reputable, well-established, Russian plasma physicist: V N Tsytovich, who is working in a reputable, well-established, dusty plasma group at MPE in Garching, Germany.

From the paper:

————

“From plasma crystals and helical structures towards inorganic living matter”
by V N Tsytovich, G E Morfill, V E Fortov, N G Gusein-Zade, B A Klumov and S V Vladimirov

Abstract. Complex plasmas may naturally self-organize themselves into stable interacting helical structures that exhibit features normally attributed to organic living matter. The self-organization is based on non-trivial physical mechanisms of plasma interactions involving over-screening of plasma polarization. As a result, each helical string composed of solid microparticles is topologically and dynamically controlled by plasma fluxes leading to particle charging and over-screening, the latter providing attraction even among helical strings of the same charge sign. These interacting complex structures exhibit thermodynamic and evolutionary features thought to be peculiar only to living matter such as bifurcations that serve as ‘memory marks’, self-duplication, metabolic rates in a thermodynamically open system, and non-Hamiltonian dynamics. We examine the salient features of this new complex ’state of soft matter’ in light of the autonomy, evolution, progenity and autopoiesis principles used to define life. It is concluded that complex self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter that may exist in space provided certain conditions allow them to evolve naturally.

—————

Does life as we usually think, need to be limited to condensed phases, and to linear polymers in solvents? This work would suggest not.

A little brain expansion for your day…

Of course, I know this. Let me point out that I was (following the piece from the show) talking specifically about Hollywood Aliens. Indeed, even a very slight glance at other genres (e.g. science fiction writing, but not only there) will open up a vast and nuanced landscape of wonderfully imagined creatures and worlds. I think in the remarks above people were mainly restricting themselves to tv and movies, as per the post.

It is a good point to bring up, though, so thanks. No harm in widening the parameters and talking about other genres of course… lots to discuss there!

-cvj

@Clifford I think in general that SciFi authors have done a better job of imagining alien life, intelligent or not, and what it might look like than Hollywood has done. Not for a lack of imagination on Hollywood’s part, but because it’s a lot easier to pay an actor to be a humanoid alien than it is to spend all that time and money on special effects.

I remember loving James White’s Sector General series of books, and some of the weird aliens that he wrote about, and many more that he hinted at (I also loved his novel All Judgement Fled), and Brenda Pearce’s novellette Crazy Oil that was published in Analog in 1975, about a planet with huge oil deposits that the humans were tapping, before they realized that the oil was alive and fighting back.

-cvj

My favorite alien is one from my imagination. The species is the aguanis, and made in the following way. Geysers from the south polar region of Enceladus were sending the most robust of that microcosm–the organic molecules and domatolites –into space, which were picked up by the in-situ detectors on the tourist spacelines passing through the region. Coincidently, the bacteria embedded in the domatolites were ideally suited for the synthetic biology experiments that were heating up on Earth (true in reality: check out Craig Venter’s work). Once the minimum ghost cel (Venter’s work) was established, iguana genes were added incrementally to the DNA to synthesize a medium-sized reptile, the aguani, making it well-suited to the Saturn environment. A modification of its two front claws gave it fingers and enabled the aguani to hold tools; rear feet with toes allowed it to balance its bulk better. Intelligence enhancements from the transhumanists of the time (who supported increasing the intelligence of their pets) led to a six-fold acceleration of normal aguani intelligence development. Posthumans and aguanis and a plethora of other synthia in the next thousands of years soon lived side-by-side. I wrote this up in a story-essay that will be published next year in a collection of essays, but I don’t know how much I can say publicly about this book yet. Speculative essays based on fact, but the speculations should be really wild.. much more than mine.

For aliens discovered outside of our solar system, don’t forget our discussion on cosmicvariance.

-cvj

There was some speculation announced at the EuroPlanet conference regarding those anomalous readings from the Viking probes on Mars, speculation that a microbal life form using H2O2 could account for some of the readings they got. Sheer speculation, I might add, but good ‘out of the box’ thinking.

@cjv; I get a real kick out of the science howlers in most SciFi, but I still love it. I think the CE is good SciFi simply because it doesn’t look like us, or anything that we’re familiar with as far as a life form.

As for finding aliens someday, I dunno but I personally think that it’s such a logical step to make that I will really not be all that surprised to turn on the TV someday and see we’ve found them. Just seems like it would be infinitely more difficult to explain no life than the other way around… but then, that might be the Ellie Arroway influence again…