When we talk about the search for extraterrestrial life, almost all of us automatically think of intelligent beings and with whom we can also communicate. In fact, many science fiction novels and films have been based on this type of encounter, imagining what a universe full of creatures similar to ourselves would be like.
In a previous interview with Carlos Briones, CSIC researcher at the Center for Astrobiology (INTA-CSIC) and author of the book Are we alone? In search of other lives in the cosmos (Critical Ed. 2020), we explore how the search for life on other planets or satellites is approached at a scientific level, and what requirements these places must have to be considered habitable. Now, we go one step further and discuss with the expert the real possibility that these supposed extraterrestrial life forms also have an intelligence similar to ours.
In the collective imagination, the concept of extraterrestrial life almost always leads us to the little green Martians, a kind of robot-person that also has an intelligence similar to human but, if there really were life out there, it could be very different from life. life as we know it, right?
Of course. As we mentioned in the previous interview, at the biochemical level this life could be very different from what exists on Earth, and give rise to organisms that we would hardly recognize as such. So it is quite unlikely that this life would also have evolved to give rise to human-like creatures.
First, the conditions of their planets or satellites of origin should have had an evolution similar to that of the Earth , and from the first very simple bacteria-like cells they would have had to reach cells similar to eukaryotes. Some of them would be multicellular, then some of these would have to be animals or similar to animal cells. And later, some of these organisms would have to have developed a brain or similar structure that gave them the same capacity to transform the world that humans have.
If you realize, the further you advance in evolution, looking at it from our point of view, from our twig of the tree, it is more difficult that exactly the same thing has happened in other places, because there have been a lot of events and processes that they might not have been produced, or they might have done it quite differently . For example, on Earth if the famous meteorite that killed the dinosaurs had not fallen, mammals would not have prospered as much and perhaps we would still be a planet populated by dinosaurs. Dinosaurs that could be highly evolved, but that by the simple fact of being oviparous could never have had a brain development as large as that of some mammals and, therefore, have generated intelligent life.
It is very attractive to look for other intelligent lives and we must continue doing it but, just as we are optimistic when we think that there may be other lives, we should not be so optimistic when talking about other intelligent lives.
On the other hand, when we talk about intelligence, we should also think about the types of intelligence, right? Not just in a human-style intelligence …
Of course, for example in the field of animals there are many cases of intelligence to a greater or lesser degree. You can think of social insects like ants or bees, or octopuses, which do wonderful things like screwing and unscrewing a cap – which seems silly but is not that simple – or crows, which have a lot of intelligence. Not to mention other primates such as chimpanzees, or dogs and cats that have behaviors of social intelligence and an ability to adapt to our way of being very remarkable. But of course, a complex intelligence like ours, with the capacity for anticipation, which develops a language with which we can refer to things in front of us that are not essential to eat or reproduce and therefore build cultural references … Let us know, on our planet only Homo sapiens has achieved it.
And actually, something like that is what we would like to find out when we talk about looking for intelligent life on another planet. We would like to have someone similar to us as an interlocutor, who would talk to us about what his world is like and also what he feels, or how he faces problems such as death … For me, a reference point for all this is ET, the extraterrestrial , that it was, apparently, a movie for children, but that what it showed us was a being totally assimilable to humans. ET produced an empathy with our brutal species because it could speak of pain, fear, loneliness … something like that I would like to have as an extraterrestrial interlocutor, not a crow that knows how to take a stick to poke in a hole and eat worms …
Well, it would be amazing to find like this on another planet …
Of course! Imagine finding an intelligent cephalopod, which is also very much from a science fiction movie, swimming in the ocean of a Jupiter moon … of course we have to keep our listening and our radio antennas attending to the cosmos, but personally I see it very difficult.
In addition, in the case of finding intelligent extraterrestrial life, there would also be the challenge of being able to communicate …
Sure, how do you have a conversation with them? That is another reason for reflection in many films and science fiction novels, in The Arrival , for example, which is a fabulous film, we are asked precisely that aliens arrive on Earth but, even with them in front of us, it costs us a lot to communicate with them because their type of language is different.
And, giving another twist, a good majority of the information we receive comes to us by sight and hearing, and we assume that other forms of communication have to do with that, but imagine that those intelligent beings in other environments have not developed the sense of sight and hearing … maybe they communicate by a complex language based on smell, or touch, or air pressure waves like those detected by insect antennas , what would we do about that? ? You can have someone intelligent but with whom you cannot relate. It’s complicated.
And, as all this will depend on the place where these beings have developed, because we have no idea, in principle, what a communication with extraterrestrial intelligences would be like. It is very suggestive, of course, in the end it is a subject that goes beyond science.
And what do you think, are we alone in the universe?
I believe that we are not alone in other lives. In the end, chemistry will lead to biology without much difficulty in those places where it is possible and where there is organic matter, water and energy. But I’m more pessimistic that we can find other intelligent lives to communicate with. There, either we are alone, or we are far away: so far in space and time that we will surely never meet.
This is also a touch of humility: we do not have to find everything we are looking for, there will be things that we spend our whole lives trying to capture and we will never get to them. I believe that the adventure is also the path itself: the search for extraterrestrial life is fascinating and is continually generating new questions, which scientific level is the most important thing there is.
You can read the continuation of the interview here: do we have the right to invade Mars?
