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"Alexander Berezin, a theoretical physicist at the National Research University of Electronic Technology in Russia, has proposed a new answer to Fermi's paradox — but he doesn't think you're going to like it. Because, if Berezin's hypothesis is correct, it could mean a future for humanity that's 'even worse than extinction.'
'What if,' Berezin wrote in a new paper posted March 27 to the preprint journal arxiv.org, 'the first life that reaches interstellar travel capability necessarily eradicates all competition to fuel its own expansion?'" foxnews.com/science/2018/06/04/aliens-are-real-but-humans-will-probably-kill-them-all-new-paper-says.html
In other words, could humanity's quest to discover intelligent life be directly responsible for obliterating that life outright? What if we are, unwittingly, the universe's bad guys?
And if you are not sure what the Fermi paradox is then the link should help, and there is a long explanation of that one in the article.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 07 2018, @01:28AM
Maybe.... I can picture scenarios where the alien biology is dissimilar enough that each side's tissues aren't recognized as organic by the others - different metabolic cycles even if they are still carbon-hydrogen based. And if we can't eat each other for nutrition, that might make an interesting start for co-existence.
Of course, there are also the nightmare scenarios where a virus from one side essentially decimates the other, and since the biology is so alien the virus' evolutionary restraint to not 100% wipe out their hosts would be absent. I'm not saying that such a nightmare is impossible, but I would say it is highly unlikely that a virus would find anything at all to successfully interact with, much less take over in an alien cell (if they even have cells...)
I'll give a "likely" to this one, something will need to actively "de-rust" the world - which is another nice definition of life: reversing entropy.
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