Hot take, no explanations:
- Planets are sentient
- Alien Robots outlive Aliens
- Photon life makes more sense
- Carbon based life is fragile
- Planets are sentient
- Alien Robots outlive Aliens
- Photon life makes more sense
- Carbon based life is fragile
Yes, we’re meat sacks that pop when poked — that’s a very conserved trait of life on Earth — but for the most part, especially with a holistic view like at a species level, we’re ridiculously hardy.
...on Earth. Take away something as simple as the magnetic field of the planet and suddenly resilient life narrows down to a couple of bacteria, Archaea, or Tardigrades [0] which still die with enough exposure.
Anything above 120 degrees C will also cook our goose and every other form of life, again short of a few Archaea [1] which still die a few degrees later.
And then there's the most basic of all: water without which some life doesn't die but doesn't exactly "live" either. A handful of spores, spore-like forms, or completely dried forms of bacteria for example can go for eons without water but they're not functioning.
And the higher level and complex the organism (thus possibly easier to recognize as life), the higher the chances one of the "subsystems" is more fragile and its failure kills the organism.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioresistance#Radioresistanc...
Antifragility plays well with this definition: it doesn't describe the state, but the potential and the ability to change. Taking into account the huge populations, and the fact that only a couple individuals must survive hardship in order for life to prevail, I can see the antifragility.
That "we can imagine" is doing a lot of the work, there. We humans are pretty limited in experience, operating parameters and yes, imagination. On but one dimension, consider the range of all possible temperatures and how narrow the band in which the lifeforms of which we have knowledge can survive. Consider the same along all other dimensions like radiation, gravity, pressure, particulate density, magnetic field intensity, perhaps others we have not even discovered yet.
Carbon life that we know about is "robust" only considering the relatively narrow ranges on our own planet.
It’s easy to be dismissive, but the reality is that life as we know it is pretty freaking incredible.
- Intelligent life develops superfast AI
- - then develops even more advanced quantum version of it.
- Life slowly starts augmenting its meatspace with advanced replicable machinery
- Eventually everything starts becoming very predictable so it start absorbing the advanced AI in our minds, which slowly becomes our essence (assuming consciousness is 'computable' ie.. not some penrose-esq orchestrated reduction)
- It then builds a hypercomputer operating at very close to max efficiency and start harvesting all matter/stars to sustain it & migrates to it.
there is another path where just like light currently exists as an EM wave packet we discover other stable forms and migrate to that.
of course this does not means the pervious iterations of life do not continue to exist, just that they become increasingly irrelevant.