Like the way humans have advanced and explored/used the world? Usually, smart creatures are predators. Forward focused eyes for depth perception and focus, the fats and protein in the meat we eat allowed our stomach's to shrink (they we bigger in the past, like how cows have 4 stomachs to process all the plant matter) and our brains to grow larger - which allowed us to be more cunning and dominant - which lead to us dominating the planet and putting ourselves in front of all species, and basically the Earth's short term health. They would probably do something we think would be awful, but absolutely normal to them. Just like how we don't feel a thing killing anything on earth for our purposes.
THIS IS WHAT I HAVE BEEN SAYING. The universe is so vast that there are life forms out ther ethat we cannot even imagine. i mean there may be life forms that thrive under any environment. look at earth for example. animals thrive on earth, land and sea. Just because we need oxygen doesnt mean other life forms do. Its takes a little thinking but it just takes some common sense.
Subsisting on Arsenic, a Microbe May Redefine Life By DENNIS OVERBYE Scientists said Thursday that they had trained a bacterium to eat and grow on a diet of arsenic, in place of phosphorus — one of six elements considered essential for life — opening up the possibility that organisms could exist elsewhere in the universe or even here on Earth using biochemical powers we have not yet dared to dream about. The bacterium, scraped from the bottom of Mono Lake in California and grown for months in a lab mixture containing arsenic, gradually swapped out atoms of phosphorus in its little body for atoms of arsenic. Scientists said the results, if confirmed, would expand the notion of what life could be and where it could be. “There is basic mystery, when you look at life,” said Dimitar Sasselov, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and director of an institute on the origins of life there, who was not involved in the work. “Nature only uses a restrictive set of molecules and chemical reactions out of many thousands available. This is our first glimmer that maybe there are other options.” Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a NASA astrobiology fellow at the United States Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., who led the experiment, said, “This is a microbe that has solved the problem of how to live in a different way.” This story is not about Mono Lake or arsenic, she said, but about “cracking open the door and finding that what we think are fixed constants of life are not.” Dr. Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues publish their findings Friday in Science. Caleb Scharf, an astrobiologist at Columbia University who was not part of the research, said he was amazed. “It’s like if you or I morphed into fully functioning cyborgs after being thrown into a room of electronic scrap with nothing to eat,” he said. Gerald Joyce, a chemist and molecular biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., said the work “shows in principle that you could have a different form of life,” but noted that even these bacteria are affixed to the same tree of life as the rest of us, like the extremophiles that exist in ocean vents. “It’s a really nice story about adaptability of our life form,” he said. “It gives food for thought about what might be possible in another world.” ... Despite this taste for arsenic, the authors also reported, the GFAJ-1 strain grew considerably better when provided with phosphorus, so in some ways they still prefer a phosphorus diet ... rest of article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/science/03arsenic.html?_r=1&src=me&pagewanted=all
I'm with you on this one. If they're advanced enough to get here, they can probably manipulate matter on an atomic level which means we don't have anything they couldn't make themselves. They could just make their own chicken and waffles. They're just curious. We would've been wiped out long ago if they were as antagonistic as we are.
That's true too. When a race is so advance and so different in nature so how they perceive thing differently from us they might end up seeing us like how we see ants or less advance species. But I kinda believe there is such a universal building block that is needed for intelligent species to evolve. If there is such thing as a multi universe there just might be such species that see things totally different than our universe.
Even if they weren't antagonistic given differences in biochemistry and technology just exposure to them might radically change us and not necessarily for the better. Even friendly aliens might unintentionally affect us with an Andromeda Strain type disease. Their biochemistry or technology could inadvertently create an Ice 9 type catastrophe. Or us getting hold of their technology without fully understanding it might lead to disaster. Our own history is littered with examples of primitive societies encountering more advanced societies and being seriously harmed if not eradicated from that contact. We have no idea what contact with a truly alien intelligence with vastly superior or even just vastly different technology will mean.
Life supporting planets are rare. If aliens could recreate such planets via terraforming then I think we would already be seing these kinds of planets all over the place. But we don't - which suggests that desperate aliens who have used up all the resources on their planets will be looking for new planets. Aliens aren't hostile just for the sake of being hostile. They need something. Just like us - we let the wildlife in Alaska live until we run out of oil and need to drill. So, just because aliens haven't done anything to us yet doesn't mean they won't later...
meh... I'm not a scientist or anything.. but I became considerably less interested when I saw that they basically GREW the bacteria into that condition. If it had come about naturally, then I would be more intrigued.
What's really astonishing is how the human brain TRIPLED in size in such a short period of time. Some of these animals have been here for centuries, but never has a species developed as fast as the homosapiens.
Doesn't the very idea of this article imply that the term 'life supporting planets' is up for interpretation?
Another case of NASA inflating a story to make some headlines (e.g., the mars "fossils")? Pathetic (and sad) if true. Link
