That's an interesting idea. On one hand I would think that something intelligent living with that little energy available per square meter would operate very slowly, such that we could communicate with it like a correspondence chess game. However, on the other hand that it alternates between pretty different climates every 250 years suggest the type of pressures that lead to different eras in Earth's history where life was predominantly smaller or more 'simple' before becoming bigger and more complex again. Maybe at low temperatures though, 250 years is a short hibernation.
I was actually thinking of the evidence of tectonic forces, too. Like a long inhale and exhale collected by the mass of the body and realized at the borders of geologic transformation every plutonic year? There's something beautiful about the image.
An even more exotic arrangement, beyond electrochemical processes, to somehow 'metabolize' matter directly into energy would exceed the definition of life in my opinion, as though it would be life 2.0 or something, and also have a pretty fascinating impact on the universe.
