Learned about this organism this morning, courtesy of @abolisyonista: it’s a myxosporian endoparasite that may have originated as an endogenous cancer, and which – uniquely among the known varieties of Earthly life! –does not use mitochondria or aerobic respiration to power its metabolism. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henneguya_zschokkei
To me, this once again gives the lie to all insufficiently alien depictions of nonhuman intelligence, most especially cozy bullshit like “A Half-Built Garden.” You think you’re going to have gently consensual afternoon three-ways with the alien species you encounter? Kids, they’re not even going to run on ATP.
@adamgreenfield I've always felt closer to the "Roadside Picnic" hypothesis of "alien contact": it can easily happen, it might have already happened, but actually noticing it or understanding any of it are entirely different matters.
@acousticmirror And if it’s of a scale or temporality to interact with us at all, I really prefer depictions like Peter Watts’s. His training as a marine biologist gives him real insight into just how varied the strategies employed even by terrestrial life can be.
@adamgreenfield This reminded me of something else I read recently about the "Mars missions". It turns out, the major problem of taking humans to Mars, aside from all the other major problems related to it, is that the moment a human sets foot on Mars, there will be, indeed, life on Mars: a myriad bacteria we'll take with us. There can be no contact or first-hand observation without contamination.
Lovely, this. Just like European colonizers traveling to the furthest reaches of the planet, what we're most likely to find on Mars is a distorted image of ourselves.
@acousticmirror This is why I kinda feel like crewed interplanetary exploration needs to be treated not as aspirational, but as something closer to a tragedy, if not a war crime.
@adamgreenfield The other side of the issue still stands, though: what about our "communication" with other species here, on Earth? We like to anthropomorphise them, we like to project things on them (I love panda bears, puppies, and kittens like the next person). How much do we actually communicate with them? How much do we really understand them? Or are these things also impossible?
@acousticmirror I have an eye on FMRI + ML attempts to characterize nonhuman cognition, and strongly suspect there’s a there there that might surprise, horrify or upbraid some of us, but if I had to cleave to either “communication is possible” or “we remain forever isolate, incommensurate, mutually opaque” it’d be the latter. (Again like Watts, I sometimes-to-often feel this way even among my beloved conspecifics.)
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