IV Strategies

The Anthropic Corollaries of the GUT predicted that the basic chemistry of life must be identical wherever it appeared in the universe, just as they stipulated that consciousness cannot interact with the universe without an essentially human nervous system and a personal history. However, though the range of emergent properties that might arise in any given biosphere was quite limited, the histories of how these properties were selected could nevertheless make certain aspects of life from different worlds fundamentally alien. Thus, for instance, the Ocean simply could not interact with airborne microorganisms. There was no significant atmosphere on Europa, only the Ocean itself, and every biological system was predicated on the condition that mineral nutrients and a stable temperature environment would always be available. Life that did not assume these things was so different from that of the Ocean as to be invisible. There were other aspects of terrestrial biology, such as the development of organisms with rigid bodies and nervous systems, that were not wholly absent from the Ocean, but which on Earth had developed to such a rococo degree that the transformations the Ocean effected were often suboptimal. The rule was that major, unfamiliar systems would not be closed down, but they were usually isolated from the new imperatives that the reformed organism acquired as the result of its transformation.

Fortunately, however, the central organizing feature of the higher multicellular terrestrial organisms was perfectly familiar to the Ocean. Biological evolution, like technological progress, was fundamentally conservative. The whole point of the crude mechanical complexity of a vertebrate body was to keep sea water flowing in its veins as it moved about in an otherwise lethal environment. Indeed, the salinity of human blood was roughly that of the seas in which life had evolved, just as the high body temperatures favored by all animals that could control their own metabolisms were fossils of an ancient climate. The Ocean had no difficulty annexing the primitive seas that flowed through the bodies of organisms from Earth. Once that was achieved, the flesh quickly became that of the new dispensation.