K.M.Northrup

I am working on an essay regarding what we can say about what form alien life might take. My thesis is there are things we can plausibly say because life—and if such life achieves sentience, any technology they might develop—will be constrained by the same 94 naturally-occurring chemical elements we have at our disposal. Some scientists seem convinced that the first evidence of intelligent life elsewhere we come across will be their artificially intelligent, robotic avatars. Barring science-fictional biological entities that secrete *unobtanium* from their pores to fabricate spaceships, it seems to me they will have to somehow extract pure metals from the ores containing them. On Earth, this required harnessing fire to heat an ore to recover base metals. What options would—just as an example—silicon-based lifeforms have for achieving the same results? Put another way, if I hand a nickle-iron meteorite to an intelligent alien on Saturn’s moon Titan, what options to they have for separating the metal they are interested in using?