Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke seemed to cover almost every variation on alien life in one book, as I recall.
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Well, some of them. The aliens who visited Earth had reached the peak of their possible evolution, and were used by the ones they served to help races capable of becoming such as they along the road to to that sort of transcendence.
A lot of it depends on what you count as "life".
Vernor Vinge had a take on it in his _A Fire Upon the Deep_ novel. In his book, AIs were capable of transcendence, morphing into something we couldn't understand which rapidly lost interest in communicating with organic life. (In email, he indicated the Puppies, who were a form of organic communal intelligence, might be able to Transcend, and implying that humanity
couldn't.)
David Brin did several explorations in his Uplift series, with organic life (based on long chain carbon molecules), hydrogen based life forms, and machine based AIs, and postulated a possible merged entity deriving from all three bases which would be fairly god-like. In a later Uplift book, Brin postulated a level of hyperspace populated by entities that were intelligent memes - thoughts that existed independent of minds to think them.
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Dennis