Is Humanity Ready for First Contact?

[Anomalocaris]

What does it mean to be a higher form of life? It doesn't mean that you are from a civilisation that is more technologically advanced. We are still the same species that existed 1,000 years ago. We're not a higher form of life compared to our medieval ancestors. We still have the same base instincts, drives and emotions. We're both apes walking around on two legs. Think of an alien, they'll be an animal too evolved in a similar way for a specific environmental niche.

A higher form of life is something more biologically complex with a larger hierarchy, in the same way that a multi-cellular organism is a higher form of life than a single celled organism, and a mammal is an even higher form of life. We already contain lower forms of life within us, like gut bacteria, or mitochondria DNA. Higher forms of life already exist on this planet. They're called corporations.

In my opinion any technological civilization much more advanced than ours would certainly have carried out extensive genetic and cybernetic modifications to its individuals to allow something like a borg like thought and data interchange, as well as to tailor or enhance health and other desirable attributes.  Such life would be much more complex than the pure biological organisms from which they were made.

They would therefore be a higher life form.

I suspect very advanced civilizations would consist of just a few super individuals, each consisting of a vast interconnected network semi-biological amd cybernetic nodes.  Each biological nodes might be a highly edited and modified versions of an individual from the original biological species that gave rise to this advanced civilization. These now form something similar to cells in the super organism.