Ever since I learned about evolution, I've been fascinated by just what life is, and whether we ourselves will ever be able to create life from inert chemicals. Since we think this has happened at all by itself at least once on Earth, maybe we can someday assist the act of creation and produce creatures superior to ourselves who will adopt us as beloved pets. (Lots of science fiction about this one, both dystopic and utopian.)

What would artificial life look like? Maybe we can start by wondering what a robot might look like. (Even more sci-fi here.) And robots don't need to be humanoid. Our world is now flush with gadgets that emulate tiny bits of responsiveness and which occasionally appear uncannily "conscious". Isn't that why we get angry at our computers?

Could artificial life reproduce? Feedback mechanism networks can be grown to any depth, apparently, and much of our hopes for robotics is invested in artificial intelligence and the fashioning of self-aware automata. Even in 1955 a memorable Scientific American story asked whether we could send one to the moon, for example, let it spawn a robot army, and have them send valuable minerals back to Earth. Of course, this form of life would lack self-interest, but it would be a start. And it might be simpler than we imagine to program natural selection into our robots so that they could even evolve just like we do, and maybe even much faster. (See .)

These are only engineering problems. But they invite us to ask deeper questions. What do we mean by "life"? Would we recognize life in black holes orbiting star cores, say, or spread over thousands of light years in diaphanous inter-galactic filaments? How would we even recognize different sorts of life here on Earth? After all, we haven't yet figured out how to test whether life on this planet sprang into being just once or many times. Nor whether one or more phyla were seeded by meteoritic hitch-hiking "monsters from outer space". (A term not to be used loosely since, to every other species in the universe, we are the monsters.)

What if alien humanoid civilizations looked very much like our own yet were surprisingly and perhaps shockingly different in the fine print? Is crime intrinsic to the nature of all higher civilizations? What about carnivory? Could that be deleted by genetic manipulation? (See to understand why I think speculative fiction on this topic should be required reading in high schools.)

And what about non-biological evolution, what Murray Gell-Mann calls ? What if some of our ancient and most form-hardened games were slightly boring for the brighter aliens? Maybe they'd want more pieces for chess, or more complicated rhyme schemes in limericks. In fact, brighter humans have already gone down these paths. For a history of elaborations on our basic chess game, see . And here are some examples of unruly limericks:


Biology student Fong Li,
Vacationed last month by the sea.
    While out on a lark,
    She spied a dead shark,
Whose stomach contents included
    five golden rings,
    four calling birds,
    three French hens,
    two turtle doves,
and a partridge in a pear tree!

— Dean Hannotte, 1977

Self-reflective limericks:
The limerick form is complex. Its contents run chiefly to sex. It burgeons with virgins, And masculine urgin's, And swarms with erotic effects. The limerick packs laughs anatomical, Into space that is quite economical. But the good ones I've seen So seldom are clean, And the clean ones are so seldom comical. The limerick is furtive and mean. You must keep it in close quarantine, Or she sneaks to the slums, And promptly becomes Disorderly, drunk and obscene.
Finally, just to prove I'm not above self-indulgence:


There was a young fellow named Hannotte,
Whose brain was the size of a planet.
    When asked if it hurt,
    He would brightly out-blurt,
"When my brain overheats, I just fan it!"

— Abraham Gringer, 1964

Of a book brought to Boston by Hannotte
All the prominent censors said, "Ban it!"
    For the book writ by Dean
    They deemed was obscene.
"Let 'em ban it", said Hannotte, "GODDAMIT!"

— Abraham Gringer, 1964

There was a young plaintiff named Nuzzi
Whose logic was chronically fuzzy.
    The judge found unpleasin'
    His crimes against reason.
Not guilty he wasn't. (Or was he?)

— Dean Hannotte, April 1988

Isaac Asimov once hypothesized that, if "banging the rocks together" (in Douglas Adams' memorable phrase) creates life as we know it, perhaps we ourselves are needed to create the next level of life. In , we create this higher life in the form of a supercomputer named Multivac. As our primitive form of life proves unable to survive the heat death of the universe, a much-evolved descendant of Multivac, now well beyond even space and time, finally answers this final question by proclaiming, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!" Kemeny, John G. "Man Viewed as a Machine". (Scientific American, April 1955).