When astrobiologists search for intelligent life in the universe, the general consensus is that it will be of a similar nature to the kind that we find on Earth. It is often assumed that the conditions that they live in will likely be the same, and that their appearance will be that of a humanoid, or something similar, but maybe intelligent life isn’t like that at all; Perhaps intelligent, extraterrestrial life is of an entirely different breed.
Now, if intelligent life truly is completely alien to our own, it may be necessary that we change the lens through which we search.
This is the approach that a team of physicists from City University of New York are taking to tackle this problem, which some call the Fermi Paradox: If there are so many stars out there with so many planets, why haven’t we found intelligent life yet?
The answer may lie not on any one planet, but within the stars that these planets orbit.
If you are entirely confused, your symptoms are normal ; this theory is completely outlandish. After all, stars are not known to be hospitable environments, even in distant proximity to them (let alone in their cores) but according to these researchers, a unique form of life may have…uh… found a way.
Now, this form of life, whether it be intelligent or not, would look nothing like us. In fact, not even our most basic organisms would appear similar, as these creatures exist as one-dimensional, cosmic string beings. By using the seemingly endless supply of energy from their host star, they could produce more and more ‘generations’ which would, in turn, ‘mutate’ to eventually become intelligent.
How this would occur is as up for debate as the theory itself.
Would they have a genetic code? Unlikely, as they are one-dimensional, and, even at our most microscopic level, we still exist as three-dimensional creatures.
Then how could they mutate?
This is where the uniqueness of this particular life-form would truly shine. If, by some means, it could encode information, self-replicate faster than it disintegrates, and create order out of disorder (a presence of free energy), then at the very least, it could be considered a life form.
As they wrote in their paper for Letters in High Energy Physics:
“If one accepts that life is merely self-replication with mutations that leads to the increasing complexity through natural selection, any system capable of such processes can be viewed as a form of life.”
They then go on to give an example of a robot capable of such feats. In a sense, even though it is not organic, the robot would be meeting the bare minimum requirement to be considered ‘life’.
Now, you may still be wondering how this could all come to be, but we simply do not have the answers to that question. In fact, we still aren’t even sure how life on Earth came to be.
As stated in the paper:
“Given how complex and non-obvious is the functioning of the biological cell that we are familiar with, and the fact that the early path of the biological evolution that has led to it is unknown, we will not speculate about the intricate series of bio-nuclear reactions that can satisfy hypothesis 2 [(self-replicate faster than it disintegrates)]. The only principle one should be guided with is that a self-replication hypercycle, if it exists, inevitably emerges in the dynamics of a complex system as a stationary process that survives out of all other processes.”
Well, even if they do exist, I’m not sure I’d want to meet them. Their house is far too warm, and even if I could stand the heat, they’re so…one-dimensional.