Most efficient ways to conquer earth

[DDE]

8 hours ago, FleshJeb said:

"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." --Isaac Asimov

I don’t think someone whose greatest experience with violence was pinching the derrière of whatever woman came into arm’s length to be an authority on the matter.

Trained violence-dealers have a much different perspective.

Anyway. @kerbiloid has opined on something I wanted to attack directly but didn’t find the right moment: the fetishization of alienness by arm-chair hard science-fictioneers, an excessive reaction to rubber-forehead aliens of pop sci-fi that sets up a likely unachievable goal, or created an element of the setting that’s going to be overbearing.

Basically, if you’re willing to go full-tilt on alien aliens, ask yourself if you’re willing to build your entire setting around them (unless your setting is planned to rival decades-long multi-author franchises, in which case, woah). Because if you don’t, the lack of exploration will make them come off as confusing rather well-developed.

On 5/24/2019 at 10:57 PM, Spacescifi said:

For example, if rulership over mankind is desired, exterminating large amounts of the population that refuse to submit is probably a bad idea.

[Historical examples self-censored due to Rule 2]

Basically, no, if you have enough on-the-ground knowledge to attempt this in the first place, you should be able to identify, single out and eradicate troublemaker groups.

Or better yet, make them serve you at the pain of death. Gratitude is a burden, you should always recruit from former enemies.

Edited May 30, 2019 by DDE

[kerbiloid]

Spoiler

@DDE, looks like we are playing in the alien team...

(no politics, just a joke)

 

Edited May 30, 2019 by kerbiloid

[FleshJeb]

1 hour ago, DDE said:

I don’t think someone whose greatest experience with violence was pinching the derrière of whatever woman came into arm’s length to be an authority on the matter.

Trained violence-dealers have a much different perspective.

I've read them both, extensively and repeatedly--Science fiction literature is one of my major hobbies, as is military history. I suggest you check which author was known for self-insertion Mary Sues and let that inform you as to the depth and maturity of his thinking. Heinlein is a good introduction to serious science fiction for teenage boys, but his themes are much more interestingly handled by Harry Harrison (Deathworld series, Stainless Steel Rat series) or Larry Niven (Ringworld series, Mote series). Niven in particular handles human/alien interaction (violent and non-violent) VERY well. If you want to get into an exploration of full species-on-species violence, The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars by Greg Bear or the Ender's Game series by Orson Scott Card are really good reads. For more on political philosophies and societies you might be interested in, the short story, ...And Then There Were None by Eric Frank Russell, and the definitive work, Cities In Flight by James Blish are very worthwhile.

In any case, please reread the quote I provided and pretend that Sun Tzu wrote it. It's much, much more subtle than anyone that's responded to me has realized. One of the unspoken points being that relying on violence as a tool carries huge strategic and opportunity costs that are often overlooked by people who want to take shortcuts to an easy and definitive solution.

As a final point, trained violence-dealers are as susceptible to confirmation bias as any other professional--To take their perspective as the definitive one is foolish. However, if those are the people you're interested in learning from, I prefer Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower over Lieutenant Heinlein.

[Mikki]

Inject (spread) a overkill type virus to all the most frequented airports/ biggest citys/ capitals and - relax. Engineering appropriate incubation time and effectiveness of said virus should be peanuts for invaders.

After reducing the human population as desired, show up generously and offer cure in exchange for total submission.

Mankind will love it. 

Edited May 30, 2019 by Mikki
spread

[kerbiloid]

16 minutes ago, Mikki said:

and offer cure in exchange for total submission.

Oaths don't work. They will betray the promise once they can.

[Mikki]

9 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Oaths don't work. They will betray the promise once they can.

Clearly, the promised vaccine is an even more effective virus.

[kerbiloid]

59 minutes ago, Mikki said:

Clearly, the promised vaccine is an even more effective virus.

The only source of food works even better. No need in mass murder.

[Thor Wotansen]

There's much easier ways of wiping out all life on earth than engineered viruses.  Roundup is a systemic herbicide that targets specific protein generation systems of a plant, and shuts them down, resulting in death.  Creating a similar substance to kill really any type of life on earth is most likely trivial.  This type of xenoforming is not what I consider to be conquering; rather, it is exterminating.  Conquering, in my mind, is the subjugation of the sentient life on the planet, for whatever purposes you need them for, be that biological computing, breeding for assault armies (but why?), or to fulfill some holy prerogative of some alien god.  Again, if they want to kill us and take our planet, they will not show up with a big fleet and do some planetary laser art.  They will send a tiny probe or a relativistic missile.

 

But really, the only thing of value to aliens, that they can get nowhere but here is us.  If they need materials, there's innumerable tons of whatever they need far closer to wherever they come from than Earth.  If they need alien soldiers, it's far easier to bio-engineer their own.  The only logical reason to come here is to meet humanity and study it's culture and biology, and if they show up with a strong display of force, then they are worried that we are a bunch of petty, violent apes that are scarcely past beating each other with clubs, and generally can't be trusted to be civilized.  And if you say that alien logic is inscrutable, it's not.  If they have a survival drive, which they would have to have to survive, they will be cautious, and if they suspect we have a small chance of beating them in a fight, they will either eradicate our military means or not come at all.

[Klapaucius]

I think @Thor Wotansen has some good points.

My take:  We always anthropormophize our alien life. Which is weird. Stanislaw Lem figured that alien life might be so alien that we just have no common point of reference to even communicate.  We form a conception of our world through five senses that work here on earth where we have light, a medium (air) for sound to travel in and for particles to affect our olfactory senses.

There is no reason to think and alien creature has any of these.  And if they do see, what do they see? It what spectrum? Do they "hear" rather than "see" light? I always thought is was odd that we put a phonograph record on voyager. How the heck would an alien do anything with that? It's almost a given that even if they got it working, they would not possess the ability to experience Bach in any manner remotely similar to us.

I reckon if we were to be wiped out by an alien species, it would be a byproduct of some other completely inscrutable motive. In the same way that the fish around a dying reef have no idea why the reef is no longer beneficial.  Those fish could not even form a conception of a world outside the water whose actions are affecting them.  They don't know what pollution is or how it came to exist.  They don't have the capacity to understand, and it is possible we would not either.

 

 

Edited May 30, 2019 by Klapaucius

[kerbiloid]

32 minutes ago, Klapaucius said:

if they do see, what do they see? It what spectrum?

In ours. Because yellow dwarves look the most (if not the only) appropriate type of stars to provide the life with a billion years of stable evolution.
Of course, they can have another set of basic colors (not RGB), but color blindness is not a problem.

36 minutes ago, Klapaucius said:

Do they "hear" rather than "see" light? I always thought is was odd that we put a phonograph record on voyager. How the heck would an alien do anything with that? It's almost a given that even if they got it working, they would not possess the ability to experience Bach in any manner remotely similar to us.

They can hear regular patterns, they can understand our range of frequencies (so, the body size as well).
They will probably anyway have either acoustic or tactile sensors to feel it.

P.S.
i like the idea that the only unique treasure on the Earth are humans.

[Guest]

9 hours ago, DDE said:

Because if you don’t, the lack of exploration will make them come off as confusing rather well-developed.

That's the whole point. Aliens are going to be confusing if we ever find them. Both you and @kerbiloid fall into one and the same trap, and that is homocentrism. Humans are a product of a very specific biosphere, which influences everything, including the way our brains developed and the way our technology developed. We will never find another planet that is exactly like ours. Why? Because our planet was shaped by life and its evolution, which is a statistical process. Your notion of what is "likely" is based on what happened here. This is an approach that's doomed to failure, because biology generalizes notoriously poorly even between terrestrial organisms.

I'm a biophysicist, and that entails a good grasp of biology. So far from "armchair hard SF writer". In fact, my area of interest (among others) is astrobiology, which involves extremophillic organisms. I can tell you that those things can get weird, and we don't even have to leave Earth for that. Which is why I keep writing about those things. If you go with rubber foreheads, biologists around the world will call your BS, and that's because that is BS. Fiction written by those with actual experience in biology (Stanislaw Lem, for example, studied medicine. His aliens are properly bizarre unless he's not being serious) tends to feature aliens that conform to what I outlined.

It's poor SF writers that can't come up with anything truly different. Those would be well advised to either not write any aliens, or just go all out and write fantasy set in space (which can be fun, too, I'm a Star Wars fan). If you're going to write science fiction, then I'm expecting to find good science inside.

Edited May 30, 2019 by Guest

[kerbiloid]

4 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

I'm a biophysicist, and that entails a good grasp of biology. So far from "armchair hard SF writer". In fact, my area of interest (among others) is astrobiology, which involves extremophillic organisms. I can tell you that those things can get weird, and we don't even have to leave Earth for that. Which is why I keep writing about those things. If you go with rubber foreheads, biologists around the world will call your BS, and that's because that is BS. Fiction written by those with actual experience in biology (Stanislaw Lem, for example, studied medicine) tends to feature aliens that conform to what I outlined.

So, how many extraterrestrial species have already been studied?
How many ET invaders have been cured by Stanislaw Lem?
How many examples of manually forced evolution have been happened, to decrease the required time from a billion years down to a giant star lifespan?
How many infrared flowers have been evolved?
How many hot sulfic extremophiles are not just bacteries stressed from every side and trying just to survive?
And what about ammonia-cool creatures? Any samples of life living in a methane cryochamber? And not just a piece of slime, but something active?
Any sample of a planet with confirmed life except earth?
Any sample of non-CNHO life? (S is not a sample, they are our bros being boiled in the underworld).

14 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

If you go with rubber foreheads,

I go with compact bags of slime, like we are. Agreed to let them be covered with chitin if they want, though can't see why they should like it.
Lightspeed is the same, so oversized thinking creatures are either nonsence or global slowpokes.
A thinking ocean would be eating itself just because it needs energy, and the only energy comes either from sky, or from the bottom, but anyway couldn't provide the thick ocean of slime with energy without boiling it from top or from bottom. So, I guess Lem just thought it out, even being a doctor.
I'm agreed to let the local superbrains exist (and probably this will happen), but only local, not larger than a hundred meters every.
And anyway without telepathy they can't rule them all as a single organism. Because physics.

21 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

We will never find another planet that is exactly like ours.

And that's why we are probably rarest if not only sapient life in the galaxy.

P.S.
Of course, I am a CHNO-water-600nm-9.81m/s² chauvinist pig.

[Spacescifi]

55 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

That's the whole point. Aliens are going to be confusing if we ever find them. Both you and @kerbiloid fall into one and the same trap, and that is homocentrism. Humans are a product of a very specific biosphere, which influences everything, including the way our brains developed and the way our technology developed. We will never find another planet that is exactly like ours. Why? Because our planet was shaped by life and its evolution, which is a statistical process. Your notion of what is "likely" is based on what happened here. This is an approach that's doomed to failure, because biology generalizes notoriously poorly even between terrestrial organisms.

I'm a biophysicist, and that entails a good grasp of biology. So far from "armchair hard SF writer". In fact, my area of interest (among others) is astrobiology, which involves extremophillic organisms. I can tell you that those things can get weird, and we don't even have to leave Earth for that. Which is why I keep writing about those things. If you go with rubber foreheads, biologists around the world will call your BS, and that's because that is BS. Fiction written by those with actual experience in biology (Stanislaw Lem, for example, studied medicine. His aliens are properly bizarre unless he's not being serious) tends to feature aliens that conform to what I outlined.

It's poor SF writers that can't come up with anything truly different. Those would be well advised to either not write any aliens, or just go all out and write fantasy set in space (which can be fun, too, I'm a Star Wars fan). If you're going to write science fiction, then I'm expecting to find good science inside.

Bad and good scifi? That is a subjective response is it not? What you may think is good scifi another may not, and what I may think is good scifi another may disagree with.

In the end, the only judgment that really matters is that of the writer. Whose story will be inevitably influenced by his/her worldview.

Case in point, to some, putting the words aliens and reality in the same sentence is an oxymoron because to them the whole idea of ET is fictional. Yet others suppose aliens could just happen to be out there, or at least hope so.  They often reason based on evolutionary theories, so aliens have to be real.That is their general line of reasoning.

Edited May 30, 2019 by Spacescifi

[Guest]

Not reality, realism. Of course you're writing fiction, but if you care about putting the "S" in SF, you should ground it in science. Of course you can write fantasy (I do, though that one is more of an "elves, dragons and dwarves" affair).

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How many hot sulfic extremophiles are not just bacteries stressed from every side and trying just to survive?

A few. Actually, a whole domain of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaea

Granted, they're not all extremophilles. But they are very primitive organisms, much different from bacteria. 

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How many infrared flowers have been evolved?

How about all of them? Try looking at a flower through any NV device, it'll still be visible. It'd be remarkable if it weren't. Unless you mean something else.

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How many examples of manually forced evolution have been happened, to decrease the required time from a billion years down to a giant star lifespan?

Directed evolution is a thing, usually done with bacteria and the M-13 bacteriophage.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/05/16/evolution-in-action-literally
This technique has some potential for combating antibiotic resistance, as an alternative to just using the phages directly.

Quote

And what about ammonia-cool creatures? Any samples of life living in a methane cryochamber? And not just a piece of slime, but something active?

Water Bears (Tardigrades) can be cooled down to liquid helium temperatures, albeit in a dehydrated state (water is the big problem in low temperatures). Several antarctic lichens have mechanisms that let them survive freezing temperatures, and once you get past that further cooling isn't much of a problem. However, due to water freezing, actually living in extremely low temperatures is rather hard. For terrestrial organisms, it's more about waiting until it gets warm.

We do not have real extraterrestrial samples, though terrestrial organisms hitching a ride into space are a serious concern. We do, however, have fossils of life from a planet that had no oxygen in atmosphere, CO2 levels that made it blazing hot and likely a high atmospheric pressure, to boot. That was our Earth, 3.5 billion of years ago.

43 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

A thinking ocean would be eating itself just because it needs energy, and the only energy comes either from sky, or from the bottom, but anyway couldn't provide the thick ocean of slime with energy without boiling it from top or from bottom. 

And how, pray tell, are you estimating how much energy does this thing actually need? Lem's genius is that he didn't actually state anything he didn't need to. It's not like a human brain, for all we know most of its mass might be a biological radiator for things actually doing the thinking. Such an organism would have a lot of its mass devoted to handling thermodynamics. Generally, after seeing enough biology's solutions to various problems, I remain convinced that there are very few laws of physics that can't be evolved around and made to work for the organism, should it be conductive to survival. 

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And anyway without telepathy they can't rule them all as a single organism. Because physics.

What physics? Give me an equation that forbids single organism from exceeding a given size. And do list all your assumptions, because your error is probably somewhere in there. 

Quote

And that's why we are probably rarest if not only sapient life in the galaxy.

If you start piling on human-centric constraints, then yes, we are. I suspect that an actual visit to a life-bearing planet will require some adjustments to that, though. I wouldn't say we are the only species capable of inventing space travel, though.

Edited May 30, 2019 by Guest

[kerbiloid]

30 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

But they are very primitive organisms, much different from bacteria. 

Yes, they are not even bacteria. It's hard to be a bacteria being boiled in a sterilizer.

30 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

How about all of them? Try looking at a flower through any NV device, it'll still be visible. It'd be remarkable if it weren't. Unless you mean something else.

So, we don't need photosynthesis? Hot battery is enough? Can we eat them? Or it's just a next pale survivor?

30 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

Directed evolution is a thing, usually done with bacteria and the M-13 bacteriophage.

How many legs do they have now? At least can they crawl?
I mean, those bacteries-scmacteries are not a thing. The more primitive is the organism- th faster it can change.
The more complex - the more lethal is any change. So, I can believe that it took 500 mln to become a jellyfish, instead of 3 bln, but the last mile is our 300 (maybe, 600) mln when you can't just force them, can you?
So, is there an example of 3 bln downto 50 mln ~60 times acceleration to grow a human-like being until the giant bursts?

30 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

Water Bears (Tardigrades) can be cooled down to liquid helium temperatures

They can't eat and reproduce at this temperature, they are just dying slower.
A cryospecies living at this temperature?

30 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

And how, pray tell, are you estimating how much energy does this thing actually need? 

Because of elementary chemistry. It can't spend less than any organism do. It's thinking, don't you forget? And the human brain eats up to 1/5 of total food energy.

30 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

Lem's genius is that he didn't actually state anything he didn't need to.

Lem's invented Solaris just as a philosophical concept of an absolutely alien alien. It isn't a biological essay, it's a philosophical one.

30 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

What physics? Give me an equation that forbids single organism from exceeding a given size.

First of all, scale the brain up and it will boil itself without active cooling (see above about energy).
Seconds, neural impulses are just 100 m/s fast. A kilometer-sized organism would be a slooooooooooooooooowpoke.
And in planetary scale, the light speed already plays role.

30 minutes ago, Dragon01 said:

If you start piling on human-centric constraints, then yes, we are. I suspect that an actual visit to a life-bearing planet will require some adjustments to that, though. I wouldn't say we are the only species capable of inventing space travel, though.

Any 1 bln evolution star type except the yellow dwarves? Or a sample of 50 mln years evolution?
How about the inner galactic regions and fronts of galactic arms and star clusters full of radiation? Or outer regions with nothing except hydrogen?

Edited May 30, 2019 by kerbiloid

[Guest]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

So, we don't need photosynthesis? Hot battery is enough? Can we eat them? Or it's just a next pale survivor?

Ah, you mean IR-based photosynthesis? What kind of IR? Near IR contributes to photosynthesis (though this is not a big effect). If your battery generates enough heat to glow in near IR, it's probably not very good, though.

There are fungi that use gamma rays for radiosynthesis. If visible light was not available, then plants would evolve to sustain on something else. Far IR, as emitted by warm things, doesn't carry enough energy to be useful for sustaining life of the kind found on Earth. 

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

They can't eat and reproduce at this temperature, they are just dying slower.
A cryospecies living at this temperature?

As I said, Earth life living at this temperature is not possible, because the darn water freezes. Ammonia is a distant possibility, but it has very weak hydrogen bonds and an awkward geometry. We do not know of any such examples, mostly because cryogenic conditions generally don't happen on Earth, except in human-induced environments. Another problem is that chemical reactions are pretty slow at those temperatures, so observing this kind of life, even if we found it somewhere, would be nontrivial. 

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Because of elementary chemistry. It can't spend less than any organism do. It's thinking, don't you forget? And the human brain eats up to 1/5 of total food energy.

Assumptions again. It can certainly spend less than our organisms do, if it uses some mechanism that is more thermodynamically efficient. Do you know what "thinking" means, on a physical/thermodynamic level? Because if you do, a lot of very prominent scientists who'd like to know, too.

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

First of all, scale the brain up and it will boil itself without active cooling (see above about energy).

Of course. What you don't seem to grasp is that we're not scaling a brain up. It's just that simple. Stop making strawmen based on your ideas of what life on Earth looks like. You can imagine a 7 billion separate brains connected to each other by biological fiber optics, each with their own cooling system. That should be close enough to home for you to grasp. And it's also a possible way how a planet-sized brain could exist. Even on Earth, there are organisms in that vein, Pando works that way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)

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How many legs do they have now? At least can they crawl?

Depends on which bacteria you use. Several of them have... well, something that can be described as legs. They typically do move around. Again, assumptions. Movement does not require legs. 

We work with bacteria because they're fast. Nobody will pay for a directed evolution experiment taking a 1000 years. Nature has billions of years to work with. 

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Yes, they are not even bacteria. It's hard to be a bacteria being boiled in a sterilizer.

Well, the point of the sterilizer is for it to be hard on bacteria. Earth's life is highly optimized for a rather narrow range of temperatures and pressures. On another planet, archea-derived complex organisms could develop, and they would be optimized for another narrow band of temperatures and pressures.

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

The more complex - the more lethal is any change. So, I can believe that it took 500 mln to become a jellyfish, instead of 3 bln, but the last mile is our 300 (maybe, 600) mln when you can't just force them, can you?

Of course you can force them to change. Just keep killing any you don't like, and the mutations that you do like will pass down. That's how evolution works. You take a great big bunch of living creatures, then start killing, by some efficient means, all that don't fit your criteria. You will then end up with a creature that does fit your criteria, if you're lucky. If you're not, you'll kill all of them. That happens in nature, too. You can increase mutation rate by carefully applying gamma rays. You'll be still limited by the reproduction rate, which is slower for large creatures.

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Seconds, neural impulses are just 100 m/s fast. 

But what if it used biological fiber optics instead? Neurons as we know them are good for normal animal sizes. Something planet-sized would have to use something else, of which there are plenty of options. We covered a large part of the planet with fiber optics, and there's exactly zero reason why a biological system couldn't evolve a fiber optic system. 

Also, why do you assume that it being slow, compared to us, matters at all? It's certainly not slow compared to a star's life cycle.

In general, it's what I've been talking about. You don't even realize you're making assumptions, because human life is "normal" for you, and you don't realize it can be departed from. Try to consider that there are many other ways of doing things. Earth life uses 22 amino acids for its basic building blocks. There are hundreds. Simple mathematics show that there's a lot of possibilities out there, and that's assuming you can only get life by building it out of amino acids. Which isn't certain, either. You're constantly falling back on what we know works, and don't seem to realize that there are other things that could work, but never appeared due to peculiarities of evolution. 

Edited May 30, 2019 by Guest

[wumpus]

Personally, I suspect that if an alien world wanted to conquer the Earth, the first we would notice it would be during the terraforming phase.  Possibly simply a probe injecting new life forms to adjust the atmosphere as necessary and prevent any lifeforms from interfering with said change.  Aliens capable of crossing interstellar distances would be as interested in "conquering" us as we are interested in "conquering" ants.

One possible example would be to add humans to a planet with carbon-based energy sources near the surface.

- this wouldn't be true, especially seeing that an ice age would be a good time to "adjust" humans.

[kerbiloid]

8 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

Ah, you mean IR-based photosynthesis? What kind of IR?

The light of red dwarves compared to the sunlight is too "soft", it lacks green photons but full of weak red ones. So, as presumed, it is bad for photosynthesis, so it's hard to expect same crop production under the red sun.
Also as any habitable planet near the red dwarf is tidally locked, it should have thick and cloudy atmosphere to soften the temperature gradient. This makes things even worse.
And additionally the red dwarves have highly unstable luminosity, and this should cause highly unstable climate on the planet.
So, looks like while red dwarves stay active for trillions years, but the conditions on their planets make any life evolution unprobable.
This means that the only star type providing really stable conditions for at least a billion years, are yellow dwarves (we have one).
This means that any lifeform higher than bacteria should highly likely evolve under a yellow dwarf sun.
The yellow dwarves, in turn, have similar characteristics, so looks like any sapient race would appear and evolve in similar conditions, like ours.

8 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

There are fungi that use gamma rays for radiosynthesis.

Is something another than these fungi living in the same conditions, forming a closed ecosystem?
What do these fungi use as a fertilizer? Fungi are heterotrophes, they can't exist without eating something.
Are they just parasiting on a bigger, "gamma-weak" ecosystem?

8 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

As I said, Earth life living at this temperature is not possible, because the darn water freezes. Ammonia is a distant possibility, but it has very weak hydrogen bonds and an awkward geometry. We do not know of any such examples, mostly because cryogenic conditions generally don't happen on Earth, except in human-induced environments. Another problem is that chemical reactions are pretty slow at those temperatures, so observing this kind of life, even if we found it somewhere, would be nontrivial. 

And yes, the first year chemistry course, "temperature and rate of chemical reactions".
And realize that the slowest and stupidest of terrestrial bacteria is a superman/flash/deadpool compared to the fastest cryogenic one.
And as duration of the evolution is limited by the star and by the planet cooling, it's unlikely if a cryogenic life ever forms something higher than bacterial films.

9 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

Assumptions again. It can certainly spend less than our organisms do, if it uses some mechanism that is more thermodynamically efficient.

It's anyway just chemistry. Do their chemistry require 1000 times less energy? Do they have other metal ions? I want that periodic table.

9 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

Do you know what "thinking" means, on a physical/thermodynamic level?

Whatever it were on a thermodynamical level, on the material level it's a chemically active slime.
Wherever th information is stored, the natural hardware adapter is just a set of relatively simple chemical compounds.
(Unless we speak about fleshless spirits).
So, unlikely their brain eats less, and produces less heat waste.
Then you have the surface-to-volume ratio, and you can estimate the largest volume of the brain still having surface temperature lower than its boiling point. Maybe several meters.
This makes you to separate brains with enough inert cold material for cooling. And this limits any thinking ocean with size of a pool.
Of course you can make it wide and hollow, but this makes the brain 2d and dramatically decreases its possible complexity, again limiting the thinking centers in size.
So, a biological thinking object greater than tens-hundreds meters is nonsense.
Even electronic one will be limited by the light speed delay.

9 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

You can imagine a 7 billion separate brains connected to each other by biological fiber optics, each with their own cooling system.

7*10⁹ * 1.5 *10^-3 = 10.5 mln m³ = a ball 135 m in diameter.
Exactly what I mean.

And additionally this ball is in a single place, while it needs effectors everywhere, equipped with their own brains.

9 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

And it's also a possible way how a planet-sized brain could exist

135 m looks rather small planet.

9 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

Depends on which bacteria you use. Several of them have... well, something that can be described as legs. They typically do move around.

How many of them have multicellular legs or can multicellulary crawl?

9 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

We work with bacteria because they're fast.

And they are "fast" exactly becausse they are primitive, they have 20 min lifespan, and you have unlimited amount of them to sort out lethal mutations.
Why don't you use, say, pigs or cows? The same with the evolution.
When there are, say, "10" lethal mutations per one useful, you either need enormous amount of specimens to leave 1 of "million" (like you do with the bacteria), or have to limit the genome change rate, figurally speaking "not more than one mutation per generation", otherwise all your specimens will be killed by at least one of the new mutations.
And the more complex is organism, the slower it grows. Mammals give a new generation after months or even years of growth.
This means that the more complex the species are, the slower the evolution goes.
So, probably you can compress 3000 mln years of the unicellular evolution in 300 mln, but highly unlikely you can do that with the last mile - 300 mln years of highly developed organisms.
So, in the best case you need at least 500 mln years of natural evolution to get a sapient species, and 1 bln years is a good low estimation of what you need from the star.
(This btw makes any star heavier than Sun inappropriate, they ive 50-200 mln years or so.)

9 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

Well, the point of the sterilizer is for it to be hard on bacteria.

The point is that proteins have same denaturation temperature on any planet. HCNO are the same.

9 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

But what if it used biological fiber optics instead?

Naturally evolved? Any samples?
And if have have such technology, why should they need biology at all?

9 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

Something planet-sized would have to use something else,

Superspeed sodium ions? Or naturally grown laser optics?

Why at all would anyone need to be planetary-sized? If you live in a forest, do you cut every tree in it?

9 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

You don't even realize you're making assumptions, because human life is "normal" for you

Earth-like life is normal for the Earth-like planets, and looks like no other type of planet can give its own life.
So, yes, the only type of life we can really meet, is earth-like or post-(earth-like).
The thinking asterods made by people are post-(earth-like).

[Guest]

OK, I've had it with your replying by line. I'm not going to waste any more time on that, especially with how this forum handles quotes. Anyway, about the only thing you have correct in the post above is that a planet most likely to have life is going to be more or less similar to Earth. The rest can be summed up in one word: "wrong". Photosynthesis works just fine with red light. If a plant evolved under a red light, it would use red light for photosynthesis. There are proteins which do not denaturate (check "intrinsically unstructured proteins"), so in a high-temperature environment life would have to do with those. Radiosynthetic fungi grow in the old reactor building in Chernobyl, so I have no idea what they grow on, but it's some sort of mold. Mold can grow on a silicon sealant between bathroom tiles, or on glue between two plates of glass (still thinking how to get rid of that one, short of throwing the whole mirror away...).

Yes, you can have a "thinking" structure of arbitrary size. Just like an electronic one. In fact, biological structures are far more complex than any electronics invented by humans, and they work much better, too. The reason natural fiber optics have not evolved is because no organism on Earth would have a use for such a thing. Also, stop basing yourself on "basic chemistry" and "simple molecules". Biology is about as far from basic chemistry as you can get. It's chemistry so ridiculously complex that we still don't understand how most of it works. Thermodynamics still apply, of course, but you can do a lot within their bounds.

Your comments about star life versus evolution of life are misaimed. Stars live a long time. It took Earth life about 4 billion years to get from the start to where it is now. Multicellular life started just 1.5 billion years ago. Even if you have an alien which would need twice as long as humans to evolve, it's still below the lifetime of a main sequence star. We work with bacteria because aspiring PHDs don't have a star's lifetime to turn in their dissertations. If we ever get around that little stumbling block, you can expect all kinds of interesting experiments to spring up, including directed evolution experiments with higher species (assuming there's still something to discover by the point we begin to outlive stars).

We are talking hypothetical, so not "samples" for you. You're welcome to give equations that allow you to calculate maximum size of an organism as precisely as you think you can do it. I will then tell you what you're doing wrong. In the specific calculation you've given, you obviously missed that I just described, in an oblique way, hooking up every human on Earth to a fiber-optic internet, as a way of poking fun at your desire to reduce everything to a variation on what we see Earth. This I can only diagnose as a terminal imagination deficiency.  

Edited June 1, 2019 by Guest

[kerbiloid]

3 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

Photosynthesis works just fine with red light. If a plant evolved under a red light, it would use red light for photosynthesis. 

Some of plants can grow at red light, this is undoubtable. The question is - rate of production, rate of energy storing. The more poor is production, the slower is the evolution.
And when this goes under a star randomly changing its luminosity (a red dwarf), things go even worse.
Also a red star planet has no day/night regular changing, so the evolution should run even slower.
So, of course, there are chances that under a red dwarf there can be a primitive life, why not. But chances to meet something sapient or at least edible look much less optimistic than under a yellow dwarf.

3 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

There are proteins which do not denaturate (check "intrinsically unstructured proteins"), so in a high-temperature environment life would have to do with those.

The life requires something more than "there are". Any sample of super-hot life which is at least bacteria? Not surviving as a microbe film in underground hot spring?

3 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

Radiosynthetic fungi grow in the old reactor building in Chernobyl, so I have no idea what they grow on, but it's some sort of mold. Mold can grow on a silicon sealant between bathroom tiles, or on glue between two plates of glass (

A very good anti-proof. As a biologist, you definitely know that fungi are heterotrophes, and can't live without eating remains of other organisms, typically plants.
The Chernobyl fungi get their food either from soil formed before the plant was built, or from outside of the station, so they just parasite on the plants which don't live in the radioactive areas.
The fungi between two glasses are fed by the biologist with food from not radioactive areas.
So, you can just exclude these fungi. They mean nothing if there are no plants where they live.

3 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

Yes, you can have a "thinking" structure of arbitrary size. Just like an electronic one. I

First of all, to have an electronic one you should first get a biological one, to invent the electronics.
And even then, its size is limited by the pure elementary arithmetics, regardless of its nature.
When a long-range signal needs so much time to get from one "neuron" to another one, that there can pass "ten" short-range signals while it's travelling, you either get an absolutely slow and ineffective brain consisting of bottlenecks, or it just gets clusterized, consisting of numerous local neuron clusters having ten local thoughts per one long-range one.

Briefly: you need at least several times more empty space between the local brains than they occupy themselves.
This means that even in a continuous structure you will have local activity areas separated by wasteland.

And in any case, the brain requires energy and repair and produces waste heat to be evacuated. So, it needs a lot of empty space between the local brains.
Please, tell me as a biologist, why there can be no elephant-sized arthropoda? The same with biobrain. So, need in the brain material between the thinking centers.

This makes any brain bigger than a small lake not sci-fi, but pure fantasy.

3 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

It took Earth life about 4 billion years to get from the start to where it is now. Multicellular life started just 1.5 billion years ago. Even if you have an alien which would need twice as long as humans to evolve, it's still below the lifetime of a main sequence star.

The main sequence includes any star with H→He reaction, the red dwarves and blue giants as well.

Spoiler

You can estimate the main sequence lifespan with any of the formulas:

Spoiler

So, presuming that a natural evolution requires at least 1 billion years of stable conditions, we can estimate the upper limit of an evolution-friendly star:
M₁ = (10⁹/10¹⁰)^-0.4 ~=2.5 M_sun.
M₂ = ((1*10⁹/6*10⁹)^0.25 - 0.14)^-1 ~=2 M_sun.

So, the sapient life has enough to evolve only near the star of M <= 2 M_sun.

(A funny fact: this is almost the Chandrasekhar limit. So, there can be no local life near a star which ever becomes a black hole.)

The red dwarves of course live long, almosr eternally compared to the Sun.
But:
1) This is eternal instability of sunlight, climate, weather, temperature; poor abilities to store energy from the soft red light.
Even more important is that this is unpredictable, not regular, cyclic.

2) The geological history of the planet doesn't depend on the eternal star life. When the gravitational differentiation gets finished, and the long-living radioactive isotopes (mostly uranium) get depleted, the geology stops, too.
For the Earth it takes about 6 billion years (we have ~ 1.5 bln years left in this sense).
When the geology stops, the planetary chemical processes stop being looped, they start depleting, too. The life feels worse and worse, then gets extinct.
The core gets cold, the magnetosphere weakens, the ozone layer gets burnt by the protons, the UV starts splitting the ocean and atmosphere moleculas.
No biology without geology. The organic life is just a top-level geological process.

Say, we have 10 bln years for this, and we don't care how long will last the star when the planet is a dead piece of stone.

M₁ = (10*10⁹/10¹⁰)^-0.4 ~=1 M_sun.
M₂ = ((10*10⁹/6*10⁹)^0.25 - 0.14)^-1 ~=1 M_sun.

So, if a star is less heavy than the Sun, we may not worry about its trillions years.
All we need to know - what can it give us compared to the Sun during its first ten billions years.
And a red dwarf can give definitely much less than a normal, Sun-like star. So, there probably can appear bacteria (deep in the ocean, where conditions are stable), maybe even algae and fungi.
But they will disappear long before evolving into something more significant than colored films on hot stones.

So, if we ever meet a life, probability is "99%" that it has evolved under the yellow dwarf light (let's reserve the "1%" for a miracle).

Edited June 1, 2019 by kerbiloid

[Scotius]

The best way to conquer Earth?

Come as friends

Share your superior science and technology with curious, impressionable humans. Help them eradicate hunger, diseases, pollution, overpopulation and most pressing social issues. Let them travel on your ships between your colonies, and settle in places they like. Insert data you provided into school curriculums across the world.

Be friendly, open and positive... and in a couple of generations you will have an entire species added to your empire's rooster without having to go to war at all

[Guest]

I'm certain the rooster wouldn't be happy about having an entire species added to it, though.  On a more serious note, this works, assuming the aliens have all the answers to those questions. Most of them are actually harder than interstellar travel. Several are human-specific and aliens might not have heard of them at all.

15 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

No biology without geology. The organic life is just a top-level geological process.

This is incorrect. This argumentation is only correct for the very earliest phase of life's evolution. Earth's biosphere, as it is now, doesn't really need geological processes, and it hasn't for a very long time. Ocean and air currents are driven by uneven insolation and Corolis effect. By this point, if volcanoes stop erupting and plate movement ceases, most life will benefit, because it would no longer run the risk of being buried under a heap of volcanic ash.

As for the brain, tell me one reason why it's impossible to have biological electronics that evolve naturally. You don't have to "invent" anything to have it evolve. In fact, many useful inventions have been copied from nature. A planet-sized "brain" would obviously have to be structured very differently from anything that had ever evolved on Earth. Your application of simple arithmetic is misguided, because it relies on several false assumptions. Human brains are extremely volume-efficient. This is because they evolved in a creature that had to be highly moblie, and the size of the cranium was additionally constrained by how humans give birth (and it's still troublesome in that regard). A brain-like organ of a static being would not be limited in a similar way, so it could be larger, instead optimizing for higher thermal efficiency and better cooling, for example. An alien of this kind would, quite obviously, think very differently from a human, but that's a given.

It is true that a red dwarf is a much worse for its planets' environment than our sun. However, if environmental conditions constantly change, life, if it gets going at any point and survives for a while, will eventually adopt to change itself. Indeed, it is often seen on Earth. When the environment isn't stable, the species that live in it can survive a wide variety of conditions, but typically breed slower. Once the environment stabilizes, they get outcompeted by species adapted and optimized specifically for it. However, such species risk dying out if the environment ever changes again. If change was constant, the former type of species would dominate. Indeed, those are actually quite suitable conditions for sapience to evolve. Humans are, after all, the most adaptable living organism that we know of.

For the record, the "fungus between two glass plates" isn't being fed with anything (not on purpose, at least). It feeds on glue that connects the two glass plates together, and presumably whatever detritus comes its way. In case it wasn't clear, it's growing on a bathroom mirror, not in a lab. Yes, fungi are heterotrophic. They're also very adaptable, and can eat just about anything organic. Likewise, the radiosynthetic mold likely feeds on dead bacteria and whatever other crap it can find inside the reactor. If you want to take a sample and check, be my guest, I need my own exposure limit for my courses. The point was: there is very little that life can't adapt to.

Edited June 1, 2019 by Guest

[Spacescifi]

3 hours ago, Scotius said:

The best way to conquer Earth?

Come as friends

Share your superior science and technology with curious, impressionable humans. Help them eradicate hunger, diseases, pollution, overpopulation and most pressing social issues. Let them travel on your ships between your colonies, and settle in places they like. Insert data you provided into school curriculums across the world.

Be friendly, open and positive... and in a couple of generations you will have an entire species added to your empire's rooster without having to go to war at all

 

What if the 'rooster' is not willing to put in the resources or time to accomplish this?

What if they do achieve it? Are they willing to accept being the new de facto gods? Since they will have done what humans have been asking for for too long? Are they willing to save us EVERYTIME we goof up from now on until eternity?

I once saw a fictional post where an alien race cured most of our diseases and provided age halting treatments. They also selected a group of humans to live off world.

The aliens themselves liked humanity, but decided that we cannot save us from ourselves. Yet they did not want nor did they have tbe capacity to babysit the ENTIRE human race.

The end result: Those alien med treatments? For all the good they did, it sterilized the human race. Meaning no more babies could be born after the 4th generation of the cured.

As for those humans living offworld, they returned to resettle earth with the aliens.

Human population was kept in control from then on, by the aliens only reversing the treatment for humans to have children to either replace humans that died, or for colonization efforts. Afterward the sterilization was redone. Genetics science the aliens were very good at. Like flipping a switch on and off. One day you can have a baby, then once you go for treatment, you cannot.

In all cases the alien pop always dwarfed the human pop, even on earth.

In the end some humans grow disgruntled and leave, trying to develop or find a cure from other aliens and maybe... retake earth someday.

Edited June 2, 2019 by Spacescifi

[kerbiloid]

6 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

Earth's biosphere, as it is now, doesn't really need geological processes, and it hasn't for a very long time. Ocean and air currents are driven by uneven insolation and Corolis effect. By this point, if volcanoes stop erupting and plate movement ceases, most life will benefit, because it would no longer run the risk of being buried under a heap of volcanic ash.

This is incorrect.
The volcanoes keep bringing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, extracted from the carbonate minerals. Together with the ocean and the plants they keep the carbon equilibrium stable. Without a source of carbon dioxide it (carbon dioxide) would be slowly getting buried by the plants of Canada and Siberia which don't immediately rot like the tropic ones, but get mineralized.
Not that stopping all volcanoes would kill the life immediately, but it would change the carbon balance and make problems for the terrestrial life adjusted to the current values of oxygen and carbon dioxide.
It was not a problem 500 bln years ago (who cares about the bugs and the crabs and their extinctions), but the mammal brains will not be glad without any doubt. Don't breath with oxygen-enriched air too long if you can.

***

But forget the volcanoes.
The geological processes keep running due to the inner exothermic processes.
Mostly, the gravitational differentiation of the mineral layers, additionally the radioactive decay.

Half-life of uranium is 4.5 bln yr, of thorium - 14 bln yr. So, 10 bln years after the planet forming, they deplete several times down.

But the main source of the inner heat is the gravitational differentiation, and it's also one-way process.

Once the core gets cold, the flows of the melted material on its surface keep getting slower and slower until the full stop.

They stop producing the electromagnetic field of the planet, and the magnetosphere weakens.
Without the magnetosphere, the solar wind stops getting stopped as the radiation belts. The solar protons are bombing the upper atmosphere providing you with spectacular auroras.

The thin and fragile ozone layer in turn weakens under this bombardment, turning into just oxygen.
Without the ozone layer stopping the solar UV, the UV starts splitting the water moleculas in the atmosphere and even in the ocean.

(As the normal stars like the Sun are shining brighter and brighter, the water evaporation gets increasing with time. The greenhouse effect forms a positive loopback enforcing the process.
So the water is raising up to the UV-insolation and gets splitted and depleted faster and faster.
But let's omit that for a moment, as the red dwarves keep their stable instable luminosity longer).

Meanwhile the original iron oxide at the core is turning into  the iron forming the core and pure oxygen which keeps raising up and oxidizing the minerals.
As an Earth-sized planet contains a lot of original iron oxides, and other minerals are already oxidized, at some moment the minerals can't getting oxidized more anymore, and the oxygen starts coming right into the atmosphere. Here on the Earth this will cause the raise of the oxygen concentration several hundred million years later, iirc.
So, once the gravitational differentiation stops, this means that all contained iron oxide is splitted, and the oxygen is released into the mantle, then into the ocean and into the atmosphere.

But on its way the oxygen oxidizes the carbon stored underground and on the surface (forest and meadow fires) and washes it out into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.
It brings more water and adds some amount of nitrogen oxides. All of them are greenhouse gases.
The sulfic compunds are getting oxidized, too. so you have a nice flow of sulfur oxides which react with water and turn into sulfic acid.
And any greenhouse effects makes the carbon dioxide dissolved in the oceans being released.

This first kills the life with the excess of oxygen burning the organisms from inside. The modern Earth turns into the old, bug-friendly Earth.
Then greenhouse effect boils everything still suffering. The Earth turns into proto-Venus.
As the water moleculas are much closer to the sky than now, and there is no more ozone layer, the UV intensively splits the water into oxygen and hydrogen.

The lightweight hydrogen quickly escapes from this hot unpleasant planet, while oxygen forms heavier than water moleculas and returns to the atmosphere.
Everything on the dry and rocky planet surface which still can be oxidized, gets oxidized.

The post-Earth proto-Venus now has a thick carbon dioxide (44 g/mol) - nitrogen (28 g/mol) - oxygen (32 g/mol) atmosphere. Clouds of sulfic acid droplets are included.
The heavy carbon dioxide stays near the surface, why the lightweight N₂ and O₂ raise up.

N₂ and O₂ dissipate into space, and you get a nice thick carbon dioxide atmosphere with acid clouds, with enormous pressure on the dry totally oxidized surface.
(Hi, Venus!)

If there is hot, you have a Venus, if there is cold, you have a frozen Venus.

Any planet is a clock with weights.

Spoiler

Once the weight is down, the ticking stops.

And the biology is just a chemically active upper layer of the geological processes.
The biology interacts with the pure geology
by breathing with oxygen and producing carbon dioxide,
by breathing with carbon dioxide and storing the pure carbon as coal,
by extracting the coal and burning it in a furnace with atmospheric oxygen,
in many other ways.

So, the biologists are geologists scratching the rocky planet with vials and studying the screaming organics calling it "life".

(And the paleontologists study their dry unwashed vials trying to understand what are they polluted with, lol).

 

8 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

As for the brain, tell me one reason why it's impossible to have biological electronics that evolve naturally.

It is already invented. They call it "neuron".

But as a neuron is just an electrically active cell, and it synthesized from the same DNA molecule like every another cell.
It requires a self-reproduction ability, it is powered with an ATPh molecule instead of pure electricity, it is overloaded by functions required for a self-replication unit, but useless for its main purpose - to transfer and to store electric signals.
Neural impulse speed is about 50..100 m/s, comapred to up to 300 000 000 m/s in pure metal wires.
So, using neurons as electronic components is like skinning an elephant with a multitool. A simple knife is much better.

A sapient species like we doesn't grow electronics inside, it just extracts the pure metals from the minerals and makes a simple thinking machine of desired configuration.
Maybe/propably later they will invent a cyborg computer combing both organic and metal components, but it anyway definitely will not be a self-sufficient organism remembering how to grow tentacles if you are a primordial jellyfish.

The natural purpose of a sapient life is exactly to make things easier, to reproduce processes in cheaper ways.
So, once a sapient species appears, it can do in centuries what the evolution could do in billion years more.

As we can see, the sapient life doesn't need a superbrain to appear.

8 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

A planet-sized "brain" would obviously have to be structured very differently from anything that had ever evolved on Earth. Your application of simple arithmetic is misguided

It would split in billions of mini-brains because while you though is passign across the planet to another continent and back, you already have thought "million" times more locally, and your Canadian sub-brain doesn't need the Australian sub-brain answer.

The situation is absolutely similar to the historical colonization.
You have a colony across the sea, and needs its own government because a when a ship with a letter arrives, they don't need your ideas anymore, while still have to send goods. At some moment they stop drinking tea.
The same with planetary-sized superbrains.

Another problem: in a continuous brain the amount of neurons involved into the thinking process obviously grows proportionally to the volume, i.e. cubic distance.
This means that a 10 bigger brain will consist of 1000 more neurons, with typical signal 10 times slower, and complexity growing as a factorial. The system starts suffering from combinatorial explosion and signal delay at once.
Very quickly it becomes totally inoperational, so you have to limit both system complexity and signal duration, i.e. the size of the system.
The inevitably leads to billions of separated thinking centers from time to time exchanging with signals.

Also a superbrain has zero redundancy, while a multi-brain system is highly redundant.

Multi-brain system can evolve, as the spent brains get replaced with new ones. While a superbrain can't.
It's hard to imagine how it could evolve without the generation change.

And what advantage can give a superbrain to a primitive organism? None. You don't need google for... almost everything before XXI century.

9 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

It is true that a red dwarf is a much worse for its planets' environment than our sun. However, if environmental conditions constantly change, life, if it gets going at any point and survives for a while, will eventually adopt to change itself.

An important point: the Earth conditions are changing with regular predictable intervals: daily day/night, tides every 12 hours, yearly summer/winter etc.
As a result the life gets organized and automated. Simple organisms and ecosystems just automatically synchronize their processes to the intervals.

The red dwarf are absolutely unpredictable by definition. They are worse than a lava lamp. No one can predict when another bubble of hot hydrogen will rise up from the core and splash across the surface.
So, once per several weeks (and nobody knows, when is the next time: a week or a month later) the red dwarf luminosity suddenly grows twice in just several hours.
Then it cools for several (unpredictable how much) days. Unpredictable number of weeks later this repeats.

This make the conditions on the red dwarf planet unpredictable but quickly changing.
This makes unappropriate the typical Earth automation of biological processes. The life can't just sleep once per day or once per year, it has to react on quick changes. So, no long-term stable biological processes under a red dwarf.

As a tidally locked planet has very stressed habitation area by definition, probably only primitive sub-life on the ocean bottom can survive and even notice nothing.
So, probably a lot of red dwarves have planets with oceanic microbes, but unlikely anything can evolve and survive a little higher.

9 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

For the record, the "fungus between two glass plates" isn't being fed with anything (not on purpose, at least). It feeds on glue that connects the two glass plates together, and presumably whatever detritus comes its way.

In other words, these fungi eat the organic compounds made of dead plants living long before the radiation source appeared.

9 hours ago, Dragon01 said:

They're also very adaptable, and can eat just about anything organic.

Which should appear from a plant.
No plants - no fungi. Even if the plants died hundreds million years ago and became oil or coal.

So, we can absolutely drop any fungus, the only significant organism is a plant, at least algae.
If a plant can't live in such conditions - nothing can. Only plants matter.

[Scotius]

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/09/010928070246.htm

How much more "alien" you think carbon life can get?

Glass - eating bacteria four miles under the oceanic floor. Life WILL find a way.