Could an alien species evolve utility fog naturally?

[Jakob]

Just a quick thought that would be a cool concept for an alien civilization. Maybe they're 4-legged creatures that don't have hands or trunks or tentacles or anything to manipulate their environment, but they do have an organ that produces biological foglets that can float around and manipulate objects for them, almost like telekinesis. I guess the big issues are

1) making foglets constantly requires tons of energy. But maybe they tend to return to the alien's body when not in use, so it they only have to gradually replace foglets that are lost or destroyed.
2) Wireless communication seems unlikely to evolve biologically. But perhaps the foglets are simply pre-programmed with instructions from the aliens' nervous system before leaving the body.
3) Making foglets capable of heavy lifting seems like it would require an impressive power source that would have to be engineered by a technological civilization. But maybe the foglets aren't very powerful individually, and the alien foglets are just worse than hands at some tasks, but make up for it by being better at others.

[Powers]

Sounds interesting but very improbable in reality. The civilization part to be exact.

[Yuli Ban]

Just a quick thought that would be a cool concept for an alien civilization. Maybe they're 4-legged creatures that don't have hands or trunks or tentacles or anything to manipulate their environment, but they do have an organ that produces biological foglets that can float around and manipulate objects for them, almost like telekinesis. I guess the big issues are

1) making foglets constantly requires tons of energy. But maybe they tend to return to the alien's body when not in use, so it they only have to gradually replace foglets that are lost or destroyed.
2) Wireless communication seems unlikely to evolve biologically. But perhaps the foglets are simply pre-programmed with instructions from the aliens' nervous system before leaving the body.
3) Making foglets capable of heavy lifting seems like it would require an impressive power source that would have to be engineered by a technological civilization. But maybe the foglets aren't very powerful individually, and the alien foglets are just worse than hands at some tasks, but make up for it by being better at others.

If they had energy, then an advanced sort of fungus could do this absolutely.

Imagine crossing a Mycorrhizal network with something like a self-assembling "intelligent" sort of fungal system that can actively respond to its environment in an almost animal-like manner, organizing spores to create shapes to, say, escape predators and eventually evolving along a path where it could mimic even abstract object, coalescing in relatively rapid time to form mimics of rocks, plants, animals (or at least the alien equivalent of them), and so on.

Remember, even mechanical gears evolved naturally!
https://phys.org/news/2013-09-functioni ... ature.html

And pistol shrimp can create little explosions as hot as the surface of the sun:


Nature can do incredibly weird things, so I would not at all say that it's entirely impossible for "biological utility fog" to exist.

[Powers]

Something I imagine this could be like are flying ants or bees that live "inside" the queen.