The search for extraterrestrial life as we don’t know it

Question for people up to date with modern biochemistry: if there were extraterrestrial microbes on Earth right now, with totally unique chemical origins unrelated to proteins, nucleic acids, saccharides, etc., how likely would we be to notice them? And which analytic method would find them first?<p>Is there a systemic search for this kind of crazy stuff, and where are the review papers for them? I don&#x27;t know the keywords!

I&#x27;ve always found the framework we use to search for extraterrestrial life to be too based on our own experience. It could take countless forms, most of which we could never recognize or understand, and might be present everywhere without us knowing. I&#x27;m glad that more of the science community is pushing to broaden our horizons.

The book Solaris by Stanislaw Lem is a really great read, describing something alien that is obviously alive, yet too foreign for humans to comprehend or interact with.

The issue of &quot;if you lose your keys at night, the first place you look is under the lamppost&quot; problem with searching for alien life has bothered me too, since I was about the age of this professor&#x27;s trip to Hawaii. But unlike her my musing never resulted in anything useful.<p>I&#x27;m so glad someone is thinking about this and that that person sounds like a broad thinker!

The first alien intelligence we humans will encounter is likely to be one created by ourselves.

I&#x27;m not sure what the point of this is. In the last 60+ years we&#x27;ve obviously learned a lot and widened our definition of where life on Earth can live (eg subsea volcanic vents, in rocks in Antarctica). We obviously don&#x27;t know the limits of biochemistry and thus in what environments life can evolve and where it can continue to live where it exists. We&#x27;re certainly not going to be detecting a world full of microbes from light years away.<p>What we&#x27;re primarily interested in is detecting tecnological life. At stellar distances this really means detecting evidence of spacefaring civilization. This means practially the same thing because the gap between initial technology and spacefaring technology is a cosmic blink of an eye.<p>And those signatures will transcend biochemistry and what type of world you originate on barring some major glaring error in our understanding of physics (eg thermodynamics being violated).<p>The reason is that life will ultimately come down to energy and mass. Both of these mean there is pressure to expand and to expand is to become visible. You can argue that expansion isn&#x27;t inevitable in all cases and you might be correct but it doesn&#x27;t matter. It matters only if <i>all</i> civilizations remain small and&#x2F;or hidden. And the odds of that go down as the number of civilizations go up.<p>I am of course talking about Dyson Swarms, a cloud of orbitals around a star. To put this in perspective, a full Dyson Swarm around our Sun would give each of the 8 billion people on EArth living area roughly equivalent in size to Africa and each person would have a million times more energy than the entire of humanity currently uses.<p>Such megastructures would be very obvious from a great distance too (ie due to the IR signature of dissipating heat). Likewise, there would be no hiding from such a civilization.

Life may not look like us, but it sure seems like it&#x27;s going to have nucleic acids just like us.<p>The building blocks are <i>extremely</i> common, they seem to have fairly broad initial conditions, and it seems like they are practically inevitable once those conditions exist.

Does life really have to be based in chemistry?<p>Is it more effective to search for phenotypical effects of life than life itself?<p>Do we care about life elsewhere unless it as advanced or more advanced than us?<p>Even if we could find in “space”, can we find it in “time”?

I think we should stop looking and start sending extremophiles to everywhere life could possibly take hold.

We&#x27;ll make lousy pets.

I will assume the curmudgeonly pose and offer that humanity will branch out and explore and...realize a deep lonliness when the quantum mechanical accidents that led to &quot;life&quot; on Earth are not quite duplicated anywhere else.<p>Sorry.

A hallucinogen is like a telescope.<p>Many users of hallucinogens report meeting &quot;machine elves&quot;.<p>Maybe we should be looking there.

For those who don&#x27;t know, there&#x27;s a very significant movement happening within factions of the US government to push disclosure on potential non-human intelligence visiting earth. This 15 minute guide is worth the read <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.uap.guide" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.uap.guide</a><p>Other significant efforts searching for alien life include the Galileo Project by Dr. Avi Loeb of Harvard <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projects.iq.harvard.edu&#x2F;galileo&#x2F;home" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projects.iq.harvard.edu&#x2F;galileo&#x2F;home</a><p>Edit: For those who don&#x27;t know, the 2022 NDAA was passed that included legislation the protect whistleblowers from disclosing to congress about unacknowledged black projects regarding reverse engineering programs that congress was not privy to. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;douglasjohnson.ghost.io&#x2F;uap-related-provisions-of-the-final-proposed-fy-2023-national-defense-authorization-act&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;douglasjohnson.ghost.io&#x2F;uap-related-provisions-of-th...</a><p>&gt; ESTABLISHMENT.—The Secretary of Defense, acting through the head of the Office and in consultation with the Director of National Intelligence, shall establish a secure mechanism for authorized reporting of— (A) any event relating to unidentified anomalous phe- nomena; and (B) any activity or program by a department or agency of the Federal Government or a contractor of such a depart- ment or agency relating to unidentified anomalous phe- nomena, including with respect to material retrieval, mate- rial analysis, reverse engineering, research and develop- ment, detection and tracking, developmental or operational testing, and security protections and enforcement.

&gt; (when they really, really love one another) can mix and meld to form a new organism that can replicate itself in turn<p>I know it&#x27;s a bit tongue-in-cheek but I kinda wish they&#x27;d go with something more realistic that also explains our perspective, something like &quot;when two organisms feel compelled to have sex&quot;. Even in humans it&#x27;s a big stretch to say that deep love is a prerequisite and I think adds some harmful personification to the natural world