Strange alien beings in the universe and near us

Living stars and superintelligent plasma life.

In a science fiction novel, Robert Forward described exotic life forms based on nuclear interactions, which could exist in high energy environments such as neutron stars. In another science fiction novel, Fred Hoyle described a living, superintelligent and extremely powerful cloud of gas and plasma. Robert Freitas and Clément Vidal speculate that even more exotic life based on gravitational fields, the fabric of apparently empty space, could exist around or inside black holes. I mentioned these and other pictures of very strange aliens in my books.

I suspect that really advanced aliens could be superintelligent balls of quantum fields or whatever sub-quantum weirdness comes underneath quantum fields. If so, there’s no good mental picture of them that we can form at this moment. But there are mental pictures of strange aliens that are much closer to home in the sense that they are based on more or less understood physics - and perhaps, as we’ll see, also much closer to home in a literal sense.

Perhaps the stars are living entities. Perhaps plasmas are intelligent beings. Perhaps there are superintelligent cosmic clouds of plasma near the Earth, which could be related to all sorts of paranormal phenomena.

Image from Wikimedia Commons.