Humans are probably one of the most interesting types of things in the galaxy.
I always think about things like, what would it mean to find something like us. Not just in terms of intelligence, but mechanistically. We only have a sample size of one, Earth. Everything we know about life comes from how we see it here. But it's also possible it doesn't have to be this way, or anything even remotely close.
I like the thought "imagine how different animals and plants are to each other. And then imagine a form of life that's that same level of difference from the whole category of plants and animals." Or even including fungi and bacteria. A whole nother *way* life could work.
What would alien life even be like, if it just assembled on its own, independent of earth life? Absolutely everything we know as life could be upended.
I think you start at the very very base. Would alien life be made of DNA? I think the implications would be wild in the case whether it was or wasn't. Think about what either of those would mean. But in reality, it's plausible that alien life, if it has some kind of instructions or code, it might not be made out of DNA, or even RNA, but something entirely different. A long string of some kind of molecule with different components? Maybe? Or maybe they replicate in a way we haven't even thought of just because we've never seen it any other way.
Then you have to move up another layer of abstraction. Are they made of cells? Little packets of self contained complexity that self-replicate individually. Or even replicate in some other way. Again, it would be so cool if alien life was, happening to converge on the same exact method as us. But also so equally cool if it's something unknown to us too.
Our criteria for life is solely based on earth life. But imagine if there was some.. goo, maybe, on an alien world. And it kept growing and growing. Would we consider it, alive? Our definition of life is that, it needs to be organized, replicate, excrete waste, and die. But think about like Pando, the big tree superorganism. It doesn't produce seeds, it reaches its roots underground and then sprouts a new "tree" once it's far enough away. But it's still all interconnected. The whole forest is one organism. And obviously Pando is made up of cells, but it's not too hard to imagine something like what if it wasn't. A goo that just consumes resources to expand and make itself bigger. Is it.. alive? Is it an alien? We'd have to redefine our definitions. You could argue that it's just a freak chemical reaction. But also isn't that what a cell is too? The only difference is the packaging.
Humans (like much of life on earth) emerge though a fractal of complexity. Societies on top of humans on top of organs on top of cells on top of organelles. Everything we see is a result of this emergent structure. And 'everything' is almost not even an exaggeration. Houses, our food, our relationships, the grass and trees outside. Dogs, language, math, and plastic. The only things that are not are basically just elements like the air, rocks and water.
But what if we're unique? Life that exists outside of earth might only be these "chemical reaction" equivalents of things. Maybe not all of it, but not inconceivably, potentially the majority of it. In cases where we find anything interesting at all, and it's not just a barren wasteland like a Mars or Venus.
It'd be so exciting to study the different complexities and unthinkable ways life could exist outside the way earth does it. But what if out of everything we could reach, earth is the most interesting thing. We study behaviors and interactions and complexity in what we consider the most basic of things. But it all relies on emergence, and the success and proliferation of a very specific model.
As fun as it would be to communicate with aliens, who knows if they have a language, who knows if they have a brain, who knows if their structure is mobile or individual. I think when we look to the stars for aliens, we're really looking for more of us. More humans in a different wrapper. More earth in a different wrapper. But maybe if we look to each other we won't be so disappointed. As sad as it could be that there might not be anything else out there that's this interesting, at least there's not nothing that's interesting in the first place.
