8. Ideas of Exotic Forms of Life

Abstract

Science and speculation have converged at the boundaries of human imagination to conceive of some very exotic states of matter and/or energy that have been claimed by their authors to represent alternative forms of life or to exhibit life-like characteristics. Those ideas have been advanced by serious thinkers and thus deserve to be evaluated in the context of our assumptions about the fundamental nature of life. We will briefly mention some of the most important ideas proposed and critically examine them in light of our proposed definition advanced in Chap. 2 that life is (1) composed of bounded microenvironments in thermodynamic disequilibrium with their external environment, (2) capable of transforming energy and the environment to maintain a low-entropy state, and (3) capable of information encoding and transmission. Only if all of those three criteria are met does the proposed idea constitute a viable alternative form of life in our view.