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Types Of Alien Life Forms?

greywolfe

Gone But Not Forgotten
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Below is a list of the types of life form that can exist in my view. Can anybody expand on this please :-
It is obvious that the multi-verse is teaming with life. For my own clarification I have split such life forms into various groups (see below) :-


1) MORTAL BIOLOGICAL LIFE FORMS - Tied to a single planet with Low-Tech skills.


2) MORTAL BIOLOGICAL LIFE FORMS - Physically tied to a single planet with Low-Tech skills but having advanced metaphysical skills enabling some interaction with types 3-4 & 5 below.


3) IMMORTAL BIOLOGICAL LIFE FORMS - Having Hi-tech skills enabling inter-galactic travel, physical immortality etc.


4) MECHANICAL LIFE FORMS - Machines created by type 3 life forms that have become self aware and operate independently from those who built them.


5) MULTI-DIMENSIONAL LIFE FORMS - Those residing in eternal space-time who's existence is no longer dependent on matter to sustain them.
 
Humans can expand on most things, you will find. If you find anything buried in our old posts that needs clarification and update, do please tell us. We are aware of our imperfect knowledge of these matters.

Thank you for flying by. Are you from Mars, by any chance? In which case, perhaps we could ask you some things . . . :)
 
What about the living gas clouds that didn't evolve on planets?
 
Timble2 said:
What about the living gas clouds that didn't evolve on planets?
Plasmoids? Organized fields of energy and superconducting ionised magnetic plasmas, living in near absolute zero temperatures of interstellar space?`
 
Pietro_Mercurios said:
Timble2 said:
What about the living gas clouds that didn't evolve on planets?
Plasmoids? Organized fields of energy and superconducting ionised magnetic plasmas, living in near absolute zero temperatures of interstellar space?`

That's them.
 
"MORTAL BIOLOGICAL LIFE FORMS - Tied to a single planet with Low-Tech skills. "

Hang on, you're not from OFSTED by any chance? :shock:
 
JamesWhitehead said:
"MORTAL BIOLOGICAL LIFE FORMS - Tied to a single planet with Low-Tech skills. "

Hang on, you're not from OFSTED by any chance? :shock:
It's the clipboards that give 'em away, every time.

greywolfe - any particular reason you're asking? Just curious - maybe you have a theory that's slowly incubating, and are merely seeking alternative input. You certainly do seem to think about lots of dfferent things.
 
Timble2 said:
What about the living gas clouds that didn't evolve on planets?
The Black Cloud is a science fiction novel written by astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle. Published in 1957, the book details the arrival of an enormous cloud of gas that enters the solar system and threatens to destroy most of the life on Earth by blocking the Sun's radiation.
...
The cloud is revealed to be a superorganism, many times more intelligent than humans, which in return is surprised to find intelligent life-forms on a solid planet.
etc... 8)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Cloud
 
Replies

Yes the Plasma/cloud entities I'd over looked -Thanks.

OFSTED - Damn it - I've been rumbled :lol:

The reason I,ve tried to document the various types of life-forms is to help
me understand the diversity of life in the cosmos and to understand my place in it. It's important for me as a low-tech mortal - to see if my status can be raised, and an understanding of the other players is key to this for me.
 
My comment would be that you (greywolfe) have unnecessarily cross-correlated a number of features or factors in defining your categories. Your taxonomy relies on a number of distinctions / dichotomies that aren't uniformly or consistently applied. For example, at one or more points you rely on the following differences:

- Planet-bound versus spacefaring
- 'Low-' versus 'Hi-'Tech
- 'Metaphysical skills' versus something you never bother to mention
- Self-awareness versus something you never mention
- Material versus matter-independent
- Mortal versus immortal
- Biological versus mechanical

The categories you listed are something of a jumble, insofar as they're not consistently defined with respect to the features / factors you seem to see as critical.

Beyond that, your treatment of some of these factors is incomplete or confusing. For example, your taxonomy jumps all the way from 'planet-bound' to 'intergalactic travel' with no mention of intermediate ranges of spacefaring capabilities. Another issue is why you seem to consider immortality and spacefaring intrinsically interconnected.

IMHO you need to spend some time laying out the interrelationships among whatever factors you feel are critical. Otherwise, your taxonomy will always be a jumble.
 
Reply 2

Thanks for your appraisal EnolaGaia. I'd like to clarify on 2 items that you queried.
On the issue of an intermediate (non-intergalactic) space travelling period where a race would go through the inter-planetary stage. I've left this phase out as it is my belief that the technology required for planet hopping very rapidly evolves into a full understanding of space-time manipulation and galactic travel. We only landed on the moon in the 1960's yet already we see anti-grav devices and a wide array of other "Exotic" devices and theories that will shortly enable us to leap (Almost seamlessly) from planet-bound to Intergalactic status. Even if there is a period of 30 years where we are stuck in our local neighbourhood - 30 years in the span of a races evoltion is not worth mentioning.
In a similar process I have linked the progress of medical science to the ability a race has to become space travellers. Any being capable of devising space vehicles will be equally concerned with preserving their own health. The ultimate (indeed only) goal of healthcare is to prevent illness. Death and ageing is an illness - it is not fate - it can and will be cured. Human Stem cell research etc will very soon (Decades) make all ageing revearsable and death obsolete.
 
You also missed out another science fiction trope: hive minds.
 
Intergalactic travel is very unlikely; it is a long way between galaxies. Perhaps you mean interstellar.

Immortality is very unlikely; eventually any lifeform will either forget its past or encounter the heat death of the universe, whichever comes soonest. Perhaps you mean very-long-lived.

Multi-dimensional life-forms; this needs a bit more work. We are multidimensional beings ourselves, existing in 3 dimensions of space and one of time. There are good reasons to suspect that life would be very difficult if not impossible in higher dimensions; a star for instance would emit radiation according to the inverse-cube law in 4 dimensions, so you'd need to get very close to it just to keep warm. Orbits would be unstable, too, so I wouldn't recommend a visit.
See The Privileged Character of 3 Dimensional Spacetime
 
Below is a list of the types of life form that can exist in my view. ...

...
On the issue of an intermediate (non-intergalactic) space travelling period where a race would go through the inter-planetary stage. I've left this phase out as it is my belief that the technology required for planet hopping very rapidly evolves into a full understanding of space-time manipulation and galactic travel. ...
In a similar process I have linked the progress of medical science to the ability a race has to become space travellers. ...

Bump ...

There's still a fundamental disconnect / ambiguity regarding the original question and the intended answers ...

The original question concerned life forms (in general; without additional qualifications). The subsequent replies (though substantive) clearly focus on only those life forms which employ technology.

Was the original query intended to address 'biological life forms in general' or 'life forms employing certain technological capabilities'?
 
I don't blame the OP for apparently confusing the concepts of 'interstellar' and 'intergalactic'; a lot of people do. Terry Nation, one of the most successful writers of science-fiction-on-TV ever, was unable to appreciate the difference.
 
God bless Linda...she's still hawking her space alien ideas....(even though things like SERPO have long been debunked).
She did originally present many years ago with a great early documentary on the 'cattle mute phenom' even though we have yet to prove that aliens have anything to do with that phenom.
 
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Intergalactic travel is very unlikely; it is a long way between galaxies. Perhaps you mean interstellar.

Immortality is very unlikely; eventually any lifeform will either forget its past or encounter the heat death of the universe, whichever comes soonest. Perhaps you mean very-long-lived.

Multi-dimensional life-forms; this needs a bit more work. We are multidimensional beings ourselves, existing in 3 dimensions of space and one of time. There are good reasons to suspect that life would be very difficult if not impossible in higher dimensions; a star for instance would emit radiation according to the inverse-cube law in 4 dimensions, so you'd need to get very close to it just to keep warm. Orbits would be unstable, too, so I wouldn't recommend a visit.
See The Privileged Character of 3 Dimensional Spacetime


Only caught up with this thread now that it's been resurrected, but I was thinking the same thing as you.
Even the distance between stars is unimaginably vast to us.
Voyager 1 - the most distant man-made object there is, left our system and entered interstellar space around 37 years after its launch and after travelling at phenomenal speed.
It will enter another star system in approximately 40,000 years.
Facts like that along with the utter absence of any life detected elsewhere in our solar system or any signals from deep space, despite decades of us listening with our most sophisticated radio telescopes, suggests to me that the probability of us ever detecting alien life is vanishingly small and the probability of detecting any life intelligent enough to converse with is as close to nil as makes no difference.
Of course it's disappointing. As a guy who can just about remember the first Moon landings, I believed we would have Moon bases and possibly even conversations with Martians by now.
Five decades of sad old reality though have convinced me that we might as well regard ourselves as alone in this huge old universe (and get out there and start populating it!).
 
I think warp speed in science fiction has unrealistically raised expectations of real life space travel. But of course, if there's a way of bending space, or flitting in between dimensions, or any other sci-fi stuff, then there's still a chance we could be, or have been visited. Just not very likely-seeming at the moment.
 
I'm still optimistic. Within the next hundred years we could detect convincing signs of life in another solar system, or (more likely) find evidence that strongly suggests the presence of life elsewhere. This will be philosophically interesting, and could lead to the acceleration of the space program as we try to confirm these suggestions. On the other hand I don't expect any true contact for many hundreds of years, unless we get very lucky.

Or possibly, very unlucky.
 
I think warp speed in science fiction has unrealistically raised expectations of real life space travel. But of course, if there's a way of bending space, or flitting in between dimensions, or any other sci-fi stuff, then there's still a chance we could be, or have been visited. Just not very likely-seeming at the moment.
...and the belief that aliens could get to earth as well. If FTL is not possible, then alien visits are rather unlikely.
On the other hand I don't expect any true contact for many hundreds of years, unless we get very lucky.
Quite. I think the most likely scenario is that some kind of AI run autonomous probe will eventually turn up, hundreds of years old, and if we're lucky, unarmed.
 
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Let's not forget interesting theories about parallel universes, and the popular theories that ufo craft are coming
from other dimensions - Then it is not a problem of distance - But how to.

If these interdimensional theories are true - 'the aliens' maybe quite near - but usually invisible..

I hypothesize that advanced quantum computers may be the key to contact?
 
Maybe more truth to what I just said..........I just posted the above reply - When I go back to original page it
disappears then reappears!

Parallel universe or technical glitch?
 
Last edited:
Maybe more truth to what I just said..........I just posted the above reply - When I go back to original page it
disappears then reappears!

Parallel universe or technical glitch?
Probably a time zone glitch caused by the servers being in America?
 
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