Who knows, there are so many alien unknowns… and perhaps it is presumptuous folly for us to even speculate on Kardashev Type II civilizations when we are just a Kardashian Season X civilization…

But the civilization was highly advanced technologically. Instead of machines, they bred specialized life forms to do the mechanical tasks they required. They also interfered with genetics and evolution to produce organisms (or alter themselves) to manufacture the exotic chemistries they used, they built enormous structures (like the Great Barrier Reef) that were actually planetary engineering works with specific purposes. They were capable of modifying evolution and climate on their world to suit their needs. They communicated by the release of chemical substances directly into ocean water, or generating and releasing plankton coded with modulated DNA carrying complex messages.

These creatures would live in a totally different time scale, it would take them centuries or millenia to carry out their plans and projects. Human activities to them would be like microsecond events, essentially undetectable, and we would be unrecognizable to them.. The Coela might have analogues of not only our science and engineering, but of our arts, languages, philosophy, mathematics, politics, even war. And we wouldn’t even recognize them as being sentient, much less a civilization. The Coela would live in perfect harmony with their environment because they would not see themselves as being separate from the environment. They would see themselves as being the sentient part of the planet, just as we see ourselves as being the sentient part of the biosphere.

Their physics would probably never develop magnets or Leyden jars, or telescopes or nuclear reactors. But they could easily modify their planet’s climate by altering ocean currents and atmospheric composition. It just might take them millions of years….

I wish I could find that post. Keyword: “Coela”.

It’s hard to speculate about what never happened, or the unknown, but we have to imagine that if ETI had never seen the stars due to meteorological or astronomical obstacles, would they have developed Newton’s Laws? If there was no SiO2 (glass) on their planet, would they have had telescopes and microscopes? And if not, what would they have replaced them with? Would a species living underwater ever develop fire or electricity?

If it is unrealistic to expect they had the exact same technologies we did, then is it not unreasonable to expect they may have stumbled onto stuff lying right in front of us that we missed. I can’t give you better examples because I can’t go there, but I find it hard to accept that ETI followed the same scientific development we did. There must be other paths, paths we can’t even imagine.

A very poor example: Western Man developed relatively few unarmed martial arts; just a few variations of boxing and wrestling, and they go back to Graeco-Roman times. But they are truly crude in comparison to what the Asians developed.

And beyond their science and technology, what about the way their society works, specifically their politics and economics? Perhaps they’d have models that simply would never occur to us, or would be hopelessly impossible for us, but entirely workable for them.

How will humanity accept intelligent beings that are, unequivocally, not human? My guess: not well. Not well at all.