This in turn brought me to the question of whether, if there are people, there are also space aliens, and if there are space aliens, whether they must also obey the laws of physics. Well, if they must relate to the laws of physics in such a way as consciously to build a space ship, we would have to speculate that they must obey the laws of physics in a way opposed to animals, which obey the law of physics unconsciously -- they can fly or they can't, for instance, according to their particular properties. They can't decide whether to fly or not, or build themselves wings.
But this brings us to what would have to be an essential property of space aliens, certainly as science fiction writers imagine them, they have intellects. While I would need to interrogate someone like Arthur C Clarke on this, I would then need to determine how a corporeal creature with an intellect differed from a man. The science fiction writer Jonathan Swift certainly postulated that there might be houyhnhnms, but at the same time, he is implying that these are "the thing which is not".
There are certainly people who expect to find space aliens with intellects, as the SETI Project testifies even in its name. The problem is that they somehow expect to find something a great deal like men. The first thing we see when we go to the SETI page is that they are scanning for "laser flashes from an extraterrestrial civilization". A laser is a peculiarly human invention, as is, for that matter, a civilization.
Almost certainly they expect that the flashes will carry some sort of code that, with diligent application, we can translate into grammatical language, a peculiarly human characteristic. We see from the popularizing shows on the Science Channel that astronomers discover puzzling patterns in radio waves from distant stars, but on examination, they turn out to be in effect non-grammatical and thus not indicative of intellect.
The essence of Noam Chomsky's project, in fact, has been to demonstrate that grammar is a result of a neo-Darwinist process of natural selection, and human language "evolved" as a set of computer code-like modules. I had to study this in graduate school, and it always struck me as poppycock, and the professors who made careers on it as charlatans. But this brings me to the puzzle of neo-Darwinist theory and what we're expecting to find on Mars.
The bottom line of the effort to explore Mars, as quite clearly stated in many of the popularizing Science Channel programs on NASA and such, has been to discover life there. This is a puzzle in itself: the purpose of the equivalent European effort to explore the Western Hemisphere from the 1400s onward was profit, pure and simple. The result was in fact so profitable that by that late 1500s Elizabeth, slow to adopt the project, commissioned Drake and others to raid the Spanish treasure fleets on the expectation that only the small percentage of the traffic thus seized would be a windfall to her own treasury.
In contrast, the US space program is a profitless money pit, a boondoggle that has formed, among other things, a huge corporate-style bureaucracy that offers sinecures and pensions to legions of idlers. (I live near JPL, believe me.) Qui bono?
I think the point is that even if one or another Mars rover or manned expedition can unearth the tiniest fossil microbe, it will prove the neo-Darwinist, i.e., secularist and materialist, theory of life's origin. So far, of course, the Mars surface environment has turned out to be a lifeless desert, and as more is learned, it appears to be not just neutral to life but hostile to it. The reaction, again as repeatedly explained on the Science Channel, is that perhaps some cataclysm exterminated life in the environment we see there, but if we dig deeper and deeper, we may still find fossils, or even colonies of microbial survivors.
And if that's unproductive, there are still the moons of Saturn -- after all, what might we find in oceans of liquid ammonia? This is still a long way from space aliens with intellects, of course. But that runs into Fermi's paradox, and it leaves completely aside the question of whether, if there are space aliens in other star systems, how those with intellects, so far an exclusively human property, would differ from humans.
I think we can reasonably conclude that the advocates of neo-Darwinist theory are in fact so insecure about it that they are spending nation-size treasuries in a so far fruitless search for additional proof. Where's President Trump when we need him?
