Found while rummaging around some old files...some comments applicable to the Fermi Paradox.

As writers and readers with an interest in science fiction themes, we often encounter the idea of extraterrestrial intelligences. I've always felt that as humanoids, our fictional aliens often resemble us far too much, not just in general morphology and biochemistry, but socially, culturally and psychologically as well. In other words, our aliens are far too much like us to be believable. Although I believe alien biologies and ecologies will not differ to much from us in general outline(critters will still be easily recognizeable as critters, and evolution has already demonstrated its tendency to repeat intself right here on Earth) they will differ considerably in detail, and their behavior will almost certainly be totally alien to us, by definition! Since the fiction writer will be primarily interested in exploring the relationships between human and alien intelligences (as opposed to animals and plants) we should give some thought to models for sapient species which are different enough from us to make them plausible, yet similar enough that what we know of biology is available to us as a resource and a reality check. Fortunately, our own planet provides us with a variety of models which are repeated often enough to reassure us that they probably show up on other worlds, as well. We can confidently make some predictions, alien life will exhibit certain characteristics in common with us, like an urge to self-preservation, a concern for perpetuation of the species, and a variety of behavioral characteristics that are common on Earth, such as territoriality, aggressive/cooperative behavior, social organization and hierarchy, sexual and reproductive strategies, communication, and so on. They may "do it" very differently, but they will still do it, and they may be very good at it.

It may be useful, in order to get the right combination of the familiar and the strange in our fictional ETs, to use commonly observed biosocial constellations we see here on Earth as models. For example, I find fictional alien societies based on social insects more believable than I do those modeled on primate bands. It's not that I think they must necessarily be organized this way, but that we should always favor the strange as SF practitioners. There are also many more taxa of social insects than of priomates, with a longer history. The one thing we can be sure real aliens will be is very, very strange. We may not be able to predict HOW they are strange, but we can certainly expect them to be totally unexpected--provided we rely on existing biological examples here on Earth to convince the reader we are not just pulling things out of thin air. The biological configuration of our alien will have consequences on its social behavior, as well as on its technology. After all, there will be highly advanced technologies based on other things than physics--our aliens may not be able to build spaceships or radio telescopes, but they may be much better than us with other sciences, such as genetics and biochemistry. They may breed their machines and grow their products and materials.

I have conceived of one of these alternative biotechnological configurations, not because I necessarily believe aliens will be like this, but because this is the sort of alien we are likely to run into, not just analogues of us with a few hundred more years of engineering expertise than we have. I invite your comments and criticism. And I encourage you to come up with your own, equally strange, alternative aliens.

I'll call my ETI the Coela, an animal very similar to our own corals, jellyfish and sea anemones. Like many of our Terran coelenterates (biologists now prefer the name Cnidarians), they have an alternative generational lifestyle. Sessile hermaphroditic colonial polyps reproduce sexually and release eggs which hatch into solitary free-swimming medusans which reproduce asexually by budding. (If you think this is a weird reproductive arrangement, read up on slime molds!) In the bottom-dwelling colonial form, they have intimate access to their fellows, forming reefs and other permanent structures that attract entire ecologies that both depend on and service numerous symbiotic, parasitic and predatory relationships. The mobile forms are active, predatory creatures. Both are armed with highly sophisticated poisonous harpoons and many species are symbiotic with algae which provide them with an alternative source of food from sunlight. They are, totally aquatic and, for the most part, marine creatures, although some species live in fresh water. They have a very long history on Earth, have been phenomenally successful, and have shown themselves to be highly resistant to cosmic catastrophes, continental drift, and ice ages. In spite of this, on Earth, they lately appear to be in severe decline. They are among the oldest known multicellular organisms.

Unlike on our planet, this basic architecture of the Coela has evolved intelligence. The bottom-dwelling forms live in massive, reef-like colonies where the individual members are not much more intelligent than their Terran counterparts. But the colonies have evolved a means of electrochemical communication so that each reef acts as a brain, the individual polyps acting as neurons in a nervous system. Somewhere along the long path of their evolution, they have evolved a collective sentience and self-awareness, but of a fashion very different from ours. They have no means of sensing light or sound, but they are marvelously equipped to sample minute chemical gradients in the surrounding seawater. This is how they sense their evironment. Communication is also handled in this way, not only within each colony, but amongst highly separated colonies, and over the milennia they have learned to coordinate their activities and act and react as a single living thing.

As the Coela evolved without hands or eyes, they compensated by developing the ability to detect and manufacture complex molecules through their own metabolic processes. They also were able to consciously modify their own evolution, by directly influencing their own genetic material; cutting, splicing and editing their own nucleic acids in their own version of DNA. Guided by their exponentially increasing intelligence and a rapidly expanding group mind, the Coela soon learned to modify the genetic materials of other species that inhabited their reef habitat. By direct manipulation of the genetic material of the eggs of the creatures they shared their world with, they created living machines to carry out the sensory, manipulative and communicative functions they lacked. Their reef towns became cities and nations of highly specialized biounits scurrying about with their own missions and tasks.

The Coela live on a different time scale than we do, their "thought" is much slower than ours, but it also operates at the molecular level, not on the gross mechanical regime we are forced to inhabit. They never developed astronomy or physics, fire or the wheel, metalworking or electronics, but they still manage to explore their seas and the continents of their world, construct a highly sophisticated science of chemistry, along with a profound and complex abstract mathematics, and through the aid of their slave organisms, optics and acoustics. They also have developed biological computers far superior to ours, and write magnificent software. Their knowledge of geology and meteorology is highly advanced, although it is as abstract to them as particle physics or cosmology is to us. They build great cities and spread into new habitats previously inaccessible to them, just as we have with our ships and spacecraft. Their entire planetary surface is alive, and conscious, and they use the biological resources of their slave species to extract materials, construct great monuments, and build public works and factories, none of which are even recognizeable to us as artifacts. And they also have their own art and philosophy, poetry and literature, which has developed in ways which we cannot hope to understand. Space travel is incomprehensible to them. But when men land on their world and begin to explore, they somehow understand what is happening and begin to take measures and lay plans against us to ensure their own security. But their mental processes are so slow that communication seems fundamentally impossible. In fact, neither species even recognizes the other as sentient.