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That is if you assume the aliens will board a ship with conventional forces and enact a human style invasion. Now what if the alien was not even sentient. A gi
by asdff 2y ago
That is if you assume the aliens will board a ship with conventional forces and enact a human style invasion.
Now what if the alien was not even sentient. A giant configuration of some structure of chemistry just floating through interstellar space, catalyzing reactions when inputs are met, lying in wait otherwise. It might not “die” in the sense that any other mass of atoms doesn’t “die.” When faced with some input it might swell up in size, divide and diffuse elsewhere. Akin more to a random chemical interaction among a few molecules in pure solvent than life as we know it.
Chemical structures like this could potentially be the wildfire patrolling the universe for fuel vs some spacefaring roman empire.
- thrance 2y agoOne might argue encountering something like this would be more akin to a natural catastrophe (like a killer meteor) rather than an alien invasion. Stephen Baxter wrote a novel in which galaxies would be regularly wiped out by a natural phenomena, and that explains why there are no aliens in his universe. It's "Manifold: Space" if you're interested.
- asdff 2y agoLife as we know it is just chemical reactions occuring within some membrane or walled environment. I don’t see why that definition couldn’t be extended to self sustaining chemical reactions that aren’t bound by a membrane or wall structure. The purpose of that membrane or wall is to just establish favorable conditions for the chemistry within the cell. If conditions could be established without such a membrane there wouldn’t be a reason for it. If reactions were energetically favorable across a wide spectrum of conditions there wouldn’t be a need for it either. There are some that consider fire to be a form of life. I don’t think that is such a wrong idea if we are to consider how wide the scope of possibilities are in the universe.