11-09-2007 - Uncategorized

sagar: Author=’Earth & Sky’ program=” video=”Life elsewhere in the universe might look like this… or it might look so different from us that we don’t even recognize it as life. Image by PiradarchiC *.. and would we even recognize it as life?*

You’ve seen space aliens in movies and on TV. But what might real alien life look like?

That’s the question scientists are asking at NASA as they prepare to launch missions in search of extraterrestrial life within our own solar system.

Earth & Sky talked to Steven Benner, a scientist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution. He said we should widen our seach for what he calls ‘weird life.’

Life here on Earth is is “carbon-based”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-based_life and needs water to survive.

But that might not be the case in the rest of the universe. Weird life is life that we’ve never seen and maybe never imagined.

But how do we search for life that we can’t imagine?

Benner said there are two ways: We can start with our own genetic code in the lab, and play around with the structure.

Or we could look at the environment we might be landing on and try to create a chemical structure that might exist there. The only rule is that weird life must be able to reproduce and evolve.

So the alien life that we find might not look anything like the aliens we see in the movies.

Written by Eleanor Imster