What About Technologically Created Life?

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Many people have speculated that when we find life in the universe, it's going to be technological. We do have a lot of machines also have left sides and roaht sides right on. Perhaps in another couple of hundred years, we'll have life like machines. perhaps other civilizations have already o them, bute don't pear to have them yet. Andand is it possible that we stumble across a universe full of oceans with slate inside, and none of them eve built a computer? That really is starting to go so far alongthe lines of speculation that er, that it's hard to know whether we can say much in that's concrete.

If extraterrestrial life is out there — not just microbial slime, but big, complex, macroscopic organisms — what will they be like? Movies have trained us to think that they won’t be that different at all; they’ll even drink and play music at the same cafes that humans frequent. A bit of imagination, however, makes us wonder whether they won’t be completely alien — we have zero data about what extraterrestrial biology could be like, so it makes sense to keep an open mind. Arik Kershenbaum argues for a judicious middle ground. He points to constraints from physics and chemistry, as well as the tendency of evolution to converge toward successful designs, as reasons to think that biologically complex aliens won’t be utterly different from us after all.

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Arik Kershenbaum received his Ph.D. in Evolutionary Biology and Ecology from the University of Haifa. He is currently College Lecturer and Director of Studies at Girton College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens — and Ourselves.

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