What if..

[blackeyed]

When we look for life on other planets we always look for water(atleast thats what i know) as we suppose that without water no life can thrive.What if there is a life that doesn't need water for it's survival?And what if it's invisible to the naked eye and can withstand harsh physical conditions?
So, is it possible that there is life out there, but we are not looking in the right direction?

[Clanad]

Possibly, but there's a host of reasons why water is necessary for life...any life to exist: Here's a good compliation of many of those reasons:

http://www.pbs.org/wg...rigins/essential.html

Furthermore, most of life on Earth is "invisible to the naked eye" and withstands harsh physical conditions... it's just that we take those harsh conditions for granted.

[jomifl]

Looking in the other direction, away from cold dark planets awash with ammonia or methane, where it is so cold that chemical reactions would be so slow that the lifetime of the solar system would not be long enough for life to have evolved, there is the sun. With the huge amounts of energy available, strong magnetic fields and electrically conductive plasmas it is possible that some form of life exists in or on the sun that is so far removed from anything that we would recognise as life that we simply wouldn't ...recognise it as life.

[johnheritage]

You might like the film The Andromeda strain, about a form of microscopic life that gets picked up in a military dust collector in space, brought back to earth and then they find out it's brutally toxic and not based on carbon. I'd recommend the original version from the ?70's / 80's?

An even more worrying question, why do we assume another form of life is going to display a form of consciousness that equates to what we think of as developed?

Turing developed an intelligence test that said, for something to be considered conscious, it has to be able to trick a human into thinking it's another human. That is still used as a gold standard by a majority of noobs.

It is massively biased towards the assumption that our form of thinking or doing things is the universal constant for intelligence.

If somethings been existing for billions of years in a higher state, controlling the orbits of planets and stars, living next to a black hole and composed of something entirely different to us, experiencing things in an entirely different manner, it's pretty darn unlikely it's going to have a chat with us about what we think about last nights episode of Neighbours.

Intelligence requires energy, as doing calculations requires energy to manipulate the universe away from random occurrences. One of the most obvious way to acquire very large amounts of energy is to build a shield around a star and line it with quantum solar cells, giving you an effectively free fusion reactor with trillions of tons of fuel in it.

I believe astronomers have found at least one star that looks like that could have been done to it. The orbits of the planets around the star are defined by it's mass. And the orbits say the mass of the star is massively out of proportion to the orbits, as it has the apparent density of a piece of cork. That would occur if someone had built a big screen around it, making it look bigger than it should