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Are Aliens Living Among Us?
pickens writes "In recent years scientists have begun to view the existence of life outside of our solar system as ever-more likely. If life does emerge readily under terrestrial conditions, then perhaps it formed many times on our home planet. To pursue this tantalizing possibility, scientists have begun searching deserts, lakes and caverns for evidence of earth-bound 'alien' life-forms, organisms that would differ fundamentally from all known living creatures because they arose independently. Microbes have already been found inhabiting extreme environments ranging from scalding volcanic vents to the dry valleys of Antarctica. Other so-called extremophiles can survive in salt-saturated lakes, highly acidic mine tailings contaminated with metals, and the waste pools of nuclear reactors. Although 'alien' microbes might look like ordinary bacteria, their biochemistry could involve exotic amino acids or different elemental building blocks so researchers are devising tests to identify exotic microbes. If shadow life is confined to the microbial realm, it is entirely possible that scientists have overlooked it."
We ARE the Aliens!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I think we have enough problems with ourselves, to worry about aliens living among us. As a matter of fact, what sort of superiour intelligence, which could get here, would use earth as anything other than their own Botany Bay Colony?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
That's not a very good disguise.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Spiders have got to be extraterrestrial. I'm just sayin' -- they are really freaky looking compared to everything else.
So there's a bunch of INS biologists asking bacteria and small plants for their green cards?
What a ridiculous idea. I'm sure we humans can all agree it's completely absurd to even wonder if there are extraterrestrials living amongst us humans. I suggest that we all ignore this article, and waste as little time as possible entertaining the laughable notion of aliens living on earth. On with your lives, fellow human friends.
:)
FTS: "Other so-called extremophiles can survive in salt-saturated lakes, highly acidic mine tailings contaminated with metals, and the waste pools of nuclear reactors.
Other so called extremophiles can survive in their parents' basements, the only light source emanating from an LCD screen, gorging themselves with Cheez-Its and Mountain Dew.
There...fixed that for you. No need to thank me.
Mr. T pitied this fool on 27 July 1992.
As the article mentions, bacteria - conventional, non-alien bacteria, which share a common ancestor with other conventional life like you, me and a tree - are found everywhere on earth.
Living things are, in general, very competitive, and very effective competitors. Otherwise, they wouldn't still be here. So the odds that a new abiogenesis event, if one occurred, would produce a lifeform that would actually be viable in the face of a billion years of evolution by the competition are, I think, remote.
Also, while living things may thrive under extreme conditions (for example, in a bath of deadly oxygen gas) this does not mean that abiogenesis can occur under such conditions.
Finally, while it is true that many lab techniques are specific to detecting conventional terrestrial life, others are not. So, unless this non-conventional life is *restricted* to some remote environment - which conventional life certainly is not, so this again seems unlikely - we would be expected to have seen it.
There are some exotic coincidences which might allow for this to be true - maybe this exotic life looks just like a bacterium under the microscope, but for whatever reason cannot be cultured at all. Maybe it can't live on sugar - maybe it requires some other exotic organic nutrient which is found out in the wild but no-one has thought to add to culture medium. All possible, but also all unlikely.
Nonetheless, problems of detection of this kind remain a serious and useful direction for inquiry, in preparation for serious efforts to locate alien life on other worlds, where we will need a wide array of avenues for detection to allow for a completely-unknown level of chemical diversity.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
it's also amazing how different forms of life can be reinvented
whales reinvented what fish do. bats reinvented what birds do
you can go down into deeper and deeper levels of reinvention of life processes too. for example, horseshoe crabs don't have iron-based red blood, they have copper-based blue blood. go deeper than that: there are bacteria that have completely reinvented photosynthesis from scratch according to an alternative methodology
of course the basest differences this article talks about is exotic, alternative forms of energy in superhot environments, superacid environments, weird chemical/ metal concentrations, etc. by necessity then, these animals have very exotic and bizarre biochemistry, but tehy are still in our family tree, because of the way they store their genes
so the deepest alternatives to life as we know it is to find some bugger somewhere who stores its genes in ways other than dna/ rna
find that bugger on earth, win the nobel prize
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Hey you want to know something? The rest of the world does not refer to people living in their country uninvited as Aliens, they refer to them as ....
... Americans
I live less than 100 miles from the southern border of the US, and there are aliens all around.
But damn, their restaurants make some of the best damn enchiladas in the world.
/* No Comment */
So aliens may already be living in the tinfoil that I make my hats with!?!?!?!?
Word game?
Excerpt:
This is almost a text book example of the scientific method isn't it? Some one has a theory "Life is very likely to arise on any Earth-like planet." You can test this and prove it right or wrong by observation. All you need are a large number of earth-like planets you lok at each one and see if there is life. OK darn we can't test this theory. So we have a usles untestable theory. Oe so we thought for for year it was untestable.
What they are saying here, is that if life is likely then maybe here on Earth it started, was wiped out, started again, wiped out again and then we are the product of the 3rd or 100th try. Each of the others being wiped out by some natural disaster like a comet impact or whatever. So here finally is a way to test the theory that life is "likely" if we can show that it happen not once but many times on Earth then it was not a one in a trillion chance but a certainty.
To prove this they only need to find one microbe that is not decedent from the same common ancestor is we are. The microbe does not even have to be living. A fossil would be as good if it could be shown not to share an common ancestor with us.
The odd thing is that there could be 100's of these right in plain sight and we'd never know it and even if we did find it how can we be sure.
Did you read it? "alien" in this context does NOT mean it came from some other place. It simply means it does not share any common ancestor with us. Even if you only read the summary you can see they are looking for "alien" life that arose hear on Earth.
Finding it means that life arose here twice (at least) and would a be revolutionary discovery. If life is common in the universe and likely to arise on any Earth-like planet then why would it not arise twice on any Earth-like planet? Or three times or 100? Science is about asking questions and this is a good question, good because it is both interesting and (maybe) possible to answer by direct observation.
No, no - that's completely wrong!
Let's approach this scientifically:
So, the true test of whether (or not) a person is an alien is to see if they weigh as much as a duck. Anyone who does is obviously made of wood, and therefore a witch^D^D^D^D^Dalien!
Anyone failing this simple test can safely be burned at the stake, as their extra-terrestrial nature has been conclusively demonstrated.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
That's heresay.