We suffer from the feeling of cosmic loneliness. Enrico Fermi (1901-1954), one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, summed up our geeky nature by asking a simple question: Where is everybody? All predictions indicate that extra-terrestrial civilizations must exist and yet we do not see them. Why are we alone? Carl Sagan (1934-1996), another great 20th century mind, suggested that the fate of intelligent civilizations is, perhaps, to destroy themselves.
But, there is an alternative. It is about the way we perceive the world and ourselves. This is the perennial problem of all geeks. We seem to be self-centered and too focused on our sense of intelligence. This makes us blind to types of intelligence practiced by other forms of life. And we are surrounded by intelligent planet-mates. Every single organism, from a bacterium to an elephant, is a practitioner of intelligent behavior. We may not appreciate enough the intelligence of our fellow planet-mates. However, intelligent extraterrestrials, if they ever visit us, just might.
A report sent by extraterrestrials from the Earth to their base could be entirely against our expectations. Intelligent extraterrestrials might conclude that the most intelligent form of life on Earth is microbial. Microbes created the planetary web three billion years ago. Microbial diversification generated other forms of life, which are inferior to microbes by being sensitive to periodic extinctions. These forms of life, including plants and animals, depend on the microbial ecological waste. The mode of living of plants and animals is the symbiotic dependency on microbes. Microbes have succeeded in creating the Internet of Living Things (ILT). The most recent invention of ILT is the cosmic adventure.
The last few sentences of the report might read:
Microbes are indestructible. Because of their potential resistance to cosmic conditions outside the home planet it is likely that the microbial civilization will expand to nearby planets. We anticipate that the animal transporting microbes from the Earth is only a vector and will not be able to survive extra-terrestrial habitats for long. But microbes may. They may live on dead bodies of their vectors until the critical mass of microbes adjust their genomes so that the new microbial mutant forms may thrive in the new conditions. From that point they may work to create ILT on the new planet.
This sci-fi scenario serves to illustrate my main argument. If we cannot recognize the presence of different forms of intelligence on our planet, are we capable of understanding intelligent civilizations outside of it? Very few people take microbes seriously. Perhaps all astrobiologists should read a beautiful account of microbial lives written by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan. One reader entitled his brief review of Microcosmos: “And we thought we were the supreme species…”
Microbial vectors
We, as microbial vectors, helping expansion of life from Earth into cosmos is a perfect non-teological scenario. There is no super natural force involved. Everything is based on the principles of self-organization and Darwinian evolution. Microbes are known to have the power of controlling their hosts including us through the “microbiota-gut-brain-axis”. All they do is create conditions for their expansion through manipulating hosts.
A computer model simulation, prompted by observations that microbes induce altruistic behavior in their hosts, showed that microbes encouraging host altruism outcompete rival microbes that do not. The altruistic behavior required for expansion of life into cosmos would involve astrobiologists and astrophysicists sacrificing their lives for the good of community wishing to travel into cosmos. Sacrificing does not necessarily mean dying. Social and family lives, nice holidays, promotions for defending right idea etc. may be sacrificed to work on the common good. However, sacrificing lives still cannot be ruled out. Through defending collective values in a direct war with rival countries wishing to start their own cosmic adventure, for example. The war may be the win-win situation for microbes. NASA has already concluded that the International Space Station is contaminated by microbes.
But the key thing is that the above fictional report makes sense only to us. SETI and similar programs may be superfluous because extra-terrestrial civilizations will never “talk” to us. The same way microbes do not “talk” to us today. Even if we learn their “language”, as we know the principles of bacterial linguistics today, this may not help us at all if we wish to dominate newly discovered extraterrestrials. For we cannot dominate microbes. This is because there are many more microbial generations, which soak up all sorts of experiences through the ILT that we do not appreciate yet. Eshel Ben-Yacob, a late Israeli physicist-turn-microbiologist, speculated that as soon as one microbe develops resistance to an antibiotic, the information is conveyed to the entire planetary microbiota.
So biocivilization of microbes is a global net. We are only small animals entangled into the net of the microbe-dominated biocivilization.
