8 Awesome Ways Life Could Be Forming In The Universe

3. Artificial Life

Although we tend to picture our aliens as greenish, humanoid and often some degree of slimy, there's a reasonable chance that they might not even be biological at all.

Whilst many thinkers limit their predictions for the technological singularity to the human race, whether or not they think it's a good thing, there's an argument for the notion that artificial intelligence is already living it up out there in the universe. In the paper Alien Minds, Professor Susan Schneider discusses the possibility that extraterrestrial "life" is more likely to be "post-biological", echoing the sentiments of many astrobiologists and NASA scientists.

The basic argument for artificially intelligent aliens is one of timescales. The human race has been around for the merest flash in terms of universal timelines, and we've already managed to create the first glimpses of AI. If civilisations have risen and fallen throughout the history of the universe, it's likely that many of them may have gotten much further than this, and have either been outlived by, or even evolved into, a synthetic thinking being many trillions of times more intelligent than we are.

Let's just hope they're friendly, WALL-E types.