I'm highly suspicious of the fact that other life forms in the universe necessarily resemble our own, although I tend to think about some things that seem to be universal like the the laws of physics and organic matter. I'm not yet very convinced that the whole organic machinery revolving around RNA/DNA is universal, although I have a very deep feeling it is... In any case, "The Caloris Network" is a reference example for me when attempting to think about how different alien lifeforms might be.

Is intelligence necessarily organic matter based? Maybe not. Maybe somewhere in the universe a spontaneous self-replicating turing machine appeared. Maybe there is life on the event horizon of a black hole, or maybe a hot type of intelligence lives inside a star.

I think we can make all kinds of wild assumptions.