When first thinking of what intelligent life would look like, I first imagine what it doesn’t look like. As most of you can imagine, intelligent life would look nothing like how we imagine it now. It’s like pre-colonization native Americans imagining what an advanced society across the ocean would be like. They can only imagine us in terms they understand. Massive canoes armed with giant bow and arrows maybe. The same is for us, we imagine aliens much like us, with ideas we understand but with advanced technology. So what might aliens look like? Well first of all their ultimate goal is extending the length of their lives, making better use of resources, and gathering intelligence. With rapidly developing technology they would replace their organic composition with technology until they could transfer their consciousness to some computer. Since there is no reason to have a big body they would make themselves very small, possibly microscopic. Since they’d be smaller they would consume less resources making colonization of other solar systems unnecessary. They probably wouldn’t ever need to leave their home either, through advanced simulations and maybe some deep space scanning technology they could fully understand the past, present, and future. Having the apex of technology, resources, intelligence, and unlimited life, they would learn their existence is pointless, they are trapped in a cage they cannot escape and would either destroy their society, reset their civilization, or upload themselves to the “matrix”. It would be much like finishing the campaign of a campaign only game but you’re stuck playing it forever, you’d rather just turn it off.

Thoughts?