Alien Intelligence

The search is fully on for signs of intelligent life on planets other than Earth. Humans have long pondered whether or not life arose elsewhere—and in particular, if it could be intelligent life. Up until the last couple of decades, this conjecture was little more than idle speculation. But now we have telescopes that have discovered thousands of planets circling nearby stars—some of those planets might harbor life. Additionally, our definition of the extreme conditions under which life can survive has greatly expanded, so we can now expect to see life surviving under fierce conditions that we once thought were impossible. More and more, it seems that the discovery of extraterrestrial life is more a matter of “when,” not “if.”

Very recently there's been yet another finding in this arena—right here on Earth—of a new type of intelligence that was under our noses, but was never before recognized. This finding is very similar to recent discoveries of terrestrial lifeforms—dubbed “extremophiles”—that thrive in conditions we once considered to be too hostile to allow life. The new discovery is a species of ocean critters called ctenophores (pronounced ten-o-fors) that are intelligent creatures who evolved their brains and nervous systems in a very different manner from the rest of Earth's species. They are some kind of alien.

From the earliest understood forms of Earth life, all the way up to us humans, the progression of nervous systems from primitive cells to the human brain have followed what we came to believe was a singular path. All life's nervous systems (so we have believed) genetically evolved to employ common neural messengers, such as serotonin, dopamine, and nitric oxide. This mechanism is the same, from nematodes to ants to humans. We've all evolved our nervous systems in the same fashion.

A Russian scientist (Leonid Moroz) who emigrated from his native land to the US two decades ago, insisted upon looking more deeply into the qualities of ctenophores. These critters had been identified and cataloged for a long time—and were considered to be a close cousin of jellyfish. When Moroz captured a few of these critters and began examining them, however, he found that, although they had evolved muscles and a nervous system like other creatures, they took an entirely different route from all other life forms.

Ctenophores are a very ancient life-form. They display an example of what is called convergence: life evolving into similar-looking critters, but doing so by following a different evolutionary path. For example, eyes have independently evolved many times, following parallel but quite different evolutionary paths. Porpoises and sharks are very similar creatures, but evolved through completely different paths. One is a mammal, the other is a fish. In the case of the porpoise and shark, we find very different critters which arrived at the same solution, because—although they started at different beginning points—they each had to solve the same problems: swimming.

What is fascinating about ctenophores is that, had their singular evolutionary route been favored by nature, life-forms on Earth today would be very different. Life would likely have eventually still evolved nervous systems and sophisticated brains, but they'd be housed in quite different kinds of animals. There would be no humans, as we know them.

This discovery has relevance to our search for extraterrestrial life. Just as the existence of extremophiles has caused us to open our minds to other kinds of life elsewhere, ctenophores seem to be advising us to open our minds even more, to understanding that intelligence may have evolved in alien ways that we have yet to understand, and to be on the lookout for some strange possibilities. We can learn from aliens right here on Earth.