Wildly speculative ideas about aliens by someone with no basis in astrobiology, an idiot made guide to the search for alien life (and maybe the state of science as a whole idk)
I have no idea how I'm supposed to rebuke all of the arguments I've heard on extra terrestrial locating when I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about and even sound half an ounce of coherent. I kinda just sprang out of bed, started browsing memes, and booked a ticket directly off the deep end of sanity boarding now. The fringe religious groups make it look so easy. I guess we'll start with a list of things that seem funny to me in the form of insane ranting. This is tumblr, after all.
1
I saw a meme earlier that really jumpstarted the whole "I'm going the genderfluidly mansplain all of space" thing. Observe, bear witness, and oh wait I don't have the image downloaded. Essentially it was a joke about creatures in the ocean assuming that because there's no thermal heat vents (chemical soup, hot and fresh, not referencing any funny video here absolutely not at all I swearrrrr) that there would be no way of life existing on the surface of the ocean.
That raises an interesting question though. Why do we only look for planets that are getting their sunlight soup-kitchen on? Why aren't we looking at like, super dense planets? This of course, is assuming that I am actually even a little bit correct to assume a more dense planet core (gravity or whatever idk) would make it warmer inside. Why aren't we talking about fungus that eats tragically exploded nuclear reactors in Eastern (relative to the USA and also assuming you don't just. Go around west instead. that is. earth is a little bit of a shape that has more than one direction to go in.) countries? I believe I heard those called radiotrophs. Why not other sources of energy? What about a species or an entire ecosphere that has a main basis in eating sound waves generated by star explosions or something?
2
I think our definition of life is too narrow. There, I said it. I think that in the whole conquest to describe everything in a neat little category (also you're not getting out of this one either Protista, I'm coming for you next you filing cabinet of things that aren't even like, at all categorizable by our other arbitrary categories) we have absolutely thrown out the idea of science as a whole. The idea that we can just say for absolute certain "These are the categories, read em and weep" and never ever question that even a little bit, well that's not very scientific now is it. Sure, experiments are repeatable if done right, but that's assuming ALL variables relevant held constant, and I don't think there's much of anything less constant than all known life at all. Why do we assume that we can just look at a virion, turn up our noses and go "NOT CELLS!!!1!111!!! DISQUALIFIIIIIIED!" when that's clearly not a living thing by our dumb dichotomy situation, but like. It's also not just a cluster of obsidian or something either.
The whole idea that life is only a very specific thing, and one based exactly on how it is here on the surface of Earth too for that matter, is a little dumb when your entire field is literally "let's find something we've never seen before yay!" and then you deny it even is real once you find it. We need to be looking at space generally just asking "huh, what's that? why is it doing that?" and not going "NOT LIFE GET OUTTA HERE DON'T CARE DIDN'T ASK!".
Expanding the parameters isn't really the answer here in my opinion either. Even if you go from categorizing all bouncy balls as being painted red to all bouncy balls as being painted, you're still disregarding the entire existence of any bouncy ball that doesn't have a shiny coat of paint. You're refusing to even acknowledge "Ah cool, that's a weird thing that isn't say, the average jumping rope! We should look at it some more!" with the analogy here being known existence as playground toys, living things being red bouncy balls and nonliving things being jumping ropes.
3
Overspecialization is ruining the search for aliens. Picture this, you're a person tasked with describing society, the human race, and all of its social nuances, let's say, an anthropologist. Sure, you probably don't need a PHD in women's studies Robotnik style, but you're gonna have one hell of a time convincing people you've reached the answer to anything at all if you've never heard of women. Argue all you like about what the definition of a woman is politically, scientifically, or anything else, but if you don't even have any sort of awareness that such a configuration of a human could exist, how are you even gonna scratch the surface of a good chunk of history, or social structure, or anything else for that matter? I mean hell, even the basic idea that male and female humans can have their cells combined to create an offspring goes out the window without that basic idea of "hmm this thing is not exactly the same in every single way to this other thing I'm looking at. I'm gonna categorize and say that nothing else outside of these categories exists. Anything nonbinary in gender or intersex in physical form can go over there and sit nicely in the corner."
The very idea only people who have studied enough are qualified to look for something, and that once you reach your ability to be qualified to look for it, that you just know more than anyone else about it by default... Why? Sure, Muay Thai instructors probably don't all know how to bake bread, and not all professional bread baking legends know how to apply full body force to knock someone down. but there's definitely intersection. Two vastly unrelated things both depend on very similar skills and concepts. I can easily see someone from a classroom (I don't know the exact appropriate word. Dojo? Gym? Classroom works I hope.) on how to hand someone their rear end showing a baker how to maximize bread kneading based on force applied, and then that baker teaching the same guy that sometimes you have to let the dough rest and rise. That when in the process of whooping butt, sometimes you need the peace to let things come into motion on their own.
Just because you don't know everything doesn't automatically mean you also know nothing. In fact, that very idea is probably how you get so many people claiming they know everything about everything, because they are not validated to join the conversation otherwise. They're not asked "why do you think this works like this?" not in a sort of teaching manner where one person assumes to know the ultimate answer and will tell the novice they're wrong and that THIS is the correct truth, but more rather to gain perspective and fuel the ability to think about things outside of your own little bubble of professionals who all learned in more or less the same way and probably lose sleep at night over similar questions. Even if someone asks a question that you find so profoundly stupid to even consider like "what if the aliens haven't come to earth because they're all lactose intolerant and they're abducting cows to cure themselves" why can't you sit and think about it for a moment? Construct an argument? Hell, if you're lucky, think deeply enough about it that you have an epiphany on something not quite the same but it got the cogs turning anyway? What if you even, maybe by some stroke of insanity and disregard for all preconceived notions, found that they might actually have a point?
Isn't it kind of the picture of scientific achievement to be that one dude who everyone is shouting at for even suggesting that the earth isn't flat, or that maybe we should stop using asbestos in everything?
4
You have simply lost your sense of wonder. To explain everything in perfect detail in a world where perfection is paradoxical, why are you trying to chemically synthesize the emotion humans define as joy in your neurons that fire into an uncaring void while your blood that was never your own carries these signals originally meant to keep your soon to be corpse and then even sooner after cosmic dust, or a bit of a dog who ate some grass, or a puff of carbon dioxide out of a tailpipe of some yet to come new great civilization's machines? What end are we trying to achieve here? It is generally known, or at least, I would assume it is given my own experiences, that immortality would be one hell of a curse. If the knowledge of everything circling right back around to nothing didn't do you in, the grief of everything you know being no more and everything you don't becoming some mix of normal would. Don't get me wrong, we should absolutely be trying to cure sickness and perfect the fine science of the prettiest song and find new ways to reinvent wheels that have been turning longer than we've known ourselves around to question them, but why? If you lose your wonder, your purpose, that thing that drives every great scientist in their childhood to look up to the stars or down at the bugs on the ground with a sense of astonishment, if we replace it with the cold clinical need to understand EVERYTHING EXACTLY HOW IT IS AND ALWAYS WILL BE then why do it at all? Why cure sickness if you can't suffer from it? Why bother to make the most beautiful piece of music anyone has ever heard if nobody, not even the composer, can stop and feel the sway of their head bobbing along? You say you've grown up, but no. I say you've grown bitter and jaded and disconnected yourself for the very purpose of connecting deeper. Why even find extra terrestrial life if we're just going to chuck them into the Protista junk drawer and move on to the next stranger civilization? What motivation could someone have to stare deeply into the profoundly unknown if they had some certainty it would ever be fully understood?
Research is amazing, it's great. I love being able to open my magic big rectangle that contains the artic winds and pull out a tub of ice cream at a whim. It's so great that we have the advancements, and I'd reckon we should make more, but why bother if the only thing that will satisfy you is ALL of the advancements? What sort of science are you going to achieve doing a completionism run of the universe itself and not sitting and enjoying what you discovered? Probably not fridges. Maybe not even bombs. At that point, you're doomed to spiral into a depression and give up the search for the ETs and Spocks of the universe entirely. Why?
IN SUMMARY (or maybe not)
I had some other points to make about things to do with finding aliens but here I go again finding my own philosophical thoughts and loss of meaning spiral and whatever. I particularly like absurdism, the direct opposition to nihilism's "why?". The ability to go "why not?". I have sort of run out of steam on the intense frantic questions and trying to show people a different way, the exact thing that this whole post says you shouldn't be doing anyway, so I'm gonna go have a pudding cup. Enjoy life, look for aliens, take the stick out of your ass, have a nice day.