I read a long time ago an essay by Asimov that described what elements could support life as a building block and why most elements cannot. I didn’t fully understand that at the time but it was interesting to see why carbon based makes sense and some other random element does not work.
Similarly, I wonder if under different planetary conditions, smart alien life (so not single cell life) can be very tiny or very large, or if there are biological constraints that would restrict that size range regardless of basic setup.
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It is not just size but also organization of the brain (or its equivalent)….for example, birds have a better organized brain structure enabling them to do a lot more with a much smaller brain ([https://www.science.org/content/article/why-bird-brains-are-more-brilliant-anyone-suspected](https://www.science.org/content/article/why-bird-brains-are-more-brilliant-anyone-suspected))…It is also possible that there may be small organisms that can communicate (e.g. using light/other EM radiation) for a “swarm intelligence” that is decentralized and self-organized. And that’s just life as we know it….it’s possible that there is life as we don’t know it that is entirely different in every aspect (e.g. in patterns of electricity or plasma around a black hole) that does not live on planets and which we may not even recognize as life (and which may not recognize us) as our time scales are too different.
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