One of the first to offer a completely unexpected look at aliens was the famous French writer Joseph Roni Sr. In the very distant 1887, he published the fantastic novel "Xipehuza", in which he told about our distant ancestors, who were at war with the crystal aliens - the Xipehuzes.
Unlike all sorts of incorporeal entities in the form of "accumulations of heat and cold", which ancient philosophers liked to talk about, the characters of Roni the elder look quite viable creatures.
Scientific theories followed fantastic works. Many interesting ideas about the possibility of organosilicon life were expressed at one time by the outstanding Soviet mineralogist and geochemist Alexander Evgenievich Fersman (1883-1945). Together with his colleague and friend, Academician Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky, he substantiated a striking idea of a possible path for the evolution of silicon life on Earth. The Fersman-Vernadsky hypothesis was developed and supplemented by the American planetary astronomer Thomas Gold (1920-2004), who suggested that at a certain stage in the development of the earth's crust, silicon life could have arisen there, still hiding in the depths of seething magma.
In 1957, the literary era of organosilicon beings ended with the release of Fred Hoyle's novel Black Cloud. In it, a prominent British astrophysicist described the appearance of a giant intelligent interstellar cloud near the Earth. This practically immortal creature travels from one star to another, feeding on the energy of the luminaries, and thinks, exchanging radio pulses between its parts.
Together with another cult sci-fi work - "Solaris" by Stanislav Lem - "Black Cloud" has long become a kind of benchmark for hypotheses about the most unusual forms of extraterrestrial life.
In the 1960s, the work of Hoyle and Lem sparked an avalanche of publications about the most paradoxical aliens. For example, the American science fiction writer Roger Zelazny wrote the story "Passion for Collecting", in which intelligent stones live on the planet Skvernida. The stones gradually grow and gain weight, collecting various atoms and molecules. Having reached a critical size, they explode, showering everything around with their embryos.
Another science fiction patriarch, Clifford Simack, came up with the romantic novella All Flesh Is Grass, where sentient flowers penetrate a space-time rift into an American town in the Midwest. Unlike the predatory triffids of John Wyndham in Day of the Triffids, these cute creatures hope for understanding and help from earthlings.
Crystals, magma, clouds, oceans, stones, flowers - this list of living and intelligent entities could be continued for a very long time. Which of this is possible in the vastness of the Universe, and which is absolutely incredible? The time has come for scientists to have their say.
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Searching for another mind
In November 1961, the first conference in the history of science on the topic "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" (SETI) was held at the Green Bank Radio Observatory (West Virginia, USA). Today, this abbreviation is familiar to every enthusiast in the study of alien civilizations. 10 years later, another section of interdisciplinary research appeared - "Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence" (CETI).
At the same time, an interesting hypothesis of Soviet scientists about the superconducting basis of reason appeared. It was developed by astrophysicist Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg. A group of French astrophysicists published an equally original hypothesis in the mid-1970s. They considered the unexpected prospect of the existence of "nuclear life" on dying stars after supernova explosions.
A systematization of all these dizzying hypotheses was required, and the great SETI and CETI enthusiast Robert Shapiro took up the task. This chemist from New York University wrote the book Life Beyond the Earth: A Guide for an Intelligent Earthling to Life in the Universe, in which he introduced an original classification of all kinds of creatures in the Universe.
On the pages of Shapiro's monograph there are plasmoids that exist in stellar atmospheres, radiobes that inhabit interstellar clouds, lavobas and magmobs - in the form of classical structures of silicon living in seas of molten lava, hydrogens are shapeless creatures floating in liquid methane and feeding on hydrogen compounds, and thermophages-cosmoites, extracting energy from the temperature difference in space and on the surface of atmosphereless planets.
At the end of June 1987 in the Hungarian city of Balatonfured the international colloquium "Bioastronomy - the next steps" was held. Here for the first time before the members of the International Astronomical Union and the International Academy of Astronautics the resounding term "protein-carbon chauvinism" sounded. With this word combination, a group of scientists led by Professor Shapiro has branded the dogma of the universality of water-carbon life. Quite naturally, most astronomers reacted negatively to such scientific extremism. So the fame of notorious scientific heretics was firmly entrenched in Shapiro's supporters.
In subsequent years, a series of programs "Cosmos" was released with the permanent presenter Karl Sagan. This famous American astronomer and brilliant scientific popularizer told a multi-million television audience about the search for intelligence in the Universe and offered his version of the habitability of the solar system. He suggested paying attention to the satellite systems of the gas giants - Jupiter and Saturn. Sagan invented amazing food chains from creatures living in the upper layers of Jupiter's monstrous atmosphere.
Collective intelligence of superorganisms
In the debate about protein-carbon chauvinism, they also recalled the old idea of the existence of superorganisms. At the beginning of the last century, the American biologist William Wheeler wrote about this. Studying the communities of various insects, such as ants and termites, he called them "superorganisms", and their way of life - "superorganizations." Ultimately, he came to the conclusion that in nature there is some kind of desire to unite groups of creatures into giant communities - superorganisms - in the same way as cells form ordinary organisms.
Wheeler's innovative ideas were adopted by science fiction writers, and in 1961 Stanislav Lem created his Solaris, where he brilliantly described the intelligent ocean. This planetary superorganism covers the entire surface of the distant Solaris, controlling its orbital motion and easily materializing any thoughts of the astronauts exploring it.
After Lem, the well-known Soviet science fiction writer Sever Feliksovich Gansovsky proposed a mundane version of superorganization, who published the story "The Master of the Bay" in 1962. It describes a very strange creature supposedly living somewhere on the islands of Polynesia. It consists of microorganisms that inhabit coastal waters and instantly combine into a single whole for protection or hunting. In this case, a giant monster appears, effortlessly flattening its victims. Squeezing out blood and juices, this superorganism immediately feeds its cells and again disintegrates, becoming invisible. Some have gone even further, drawing on ideas from James Lovelock. This is how "intelligent" constellations, galaxies and their clusters appeared. The highest point of such creativity was the idea that the entire Universe is a superorganism, consisting of "cells" - planets and stars.
Fermi paradox versus Copernicus-Bruno principle
The main question that enthusiasts of the "living" space cannot answer: where are all these aliens?
This simple observation is more than six decades old, and it was expressed by the outstanding physicist Enrico Fermi. Ufologists are trying to oppose the Fermi paradox with the Copernicus-Bruno principle. According to the latter, the solar system is the most ordinary place in the universe, and earthly forms of life should be common everywhere. The denial of protein-carbon chauvinism allows us to look at this problem from a completely different perspective.
Here we can assume that the emergence of life on our planet (either naturally or by panspermia - by introduction from space) is not an accidental event. Even if at a certain stage, exactly as Arthur Clarke described it in his incomparable book 2001: A Space Odyssey, someone from the outside "corrected" the evolution of ancient primates and a mind arose. Only here the altruism of aliens ends, and their ultimate goal is simply to prepare the Earth for the creation of something fundamentally different. For example, carbon-protein creatures must recycle most of the chemical compounds and create a springboard for the development of aliens. This idea has been repeatedly encountered in science fiction in connection with the effect of global warming, which prepares Venusian conditions for new inhabitants. Naturally, in this case, the protein mind is threatened with complete self-destruction.
Another version unpretentiously suggests that our planet is just a “farm” for breeding intelligent beings. It is difficult to say exactly what fruits of earthly civilization can attract strangers. A lot can be assumed here. For example, some crystalline mind may be interested in biotechnology and genetic engineering, as a highly specific aspect of human activity.
Thus, if you do not fall into protein-carbon chauvinism, life appears as a way of being for special entities that support the intelligent organization of matter in the Universe.
Naturally, such living organisms must exist under a variety of physical and chemical conditions, constantly adapting to them and regenerating. Well, as a result of the study of protein-carbon chauvinism, one can cite the famous definition of Krzysztof Zanussi: "Life is a hereditary disease with a fatal sexually transmitted disease."
Oleg Faig