Earthsky Interviews
If we found alien life, would we know it?
11-07-2007 - Space
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. A 2007 report from the National Research Council recommended widening this search to include what they called ‘weird life.’
Steven Benner is a scientist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, and contributed to the report. He said the basic assumption about life is that it’s like us – it’s carbon-based and requires 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.
Our thanks to:
Steven Benner
Institute for Applied Molecular Evolution
see you later
I hope thier not like aliens in the movies because thats creepy!Oh I almost forgot,if we do find any what would happen if we got in a big war like war of the worlds?
The alien life would annihilate us because we are nothing but predictable germs that care about nothing but power
if there was life other than that on earth in are solar system that had inteligence wouldnt it have already tried to contact us also this weird life what if it lives in a way that hasn’t been seen before and it almost bends certain laws of science wouldnt that meen we have to rethink almost every one of our discoveries
well u will have to consider that what if the alien lifeforms are intelligent and that they dont think we are intelligent enough to contact…thers always that possibilities…or maybe that the distances are so great that they can’t. also what happende to all the wierd symbols that were found on our earth and that we are just not getting there point. there are so many possibilities that it is arrogant to think that we are the only intelligent life forms…
Right you are, Drew.
There’s seems no reason to theorize that the incredible choas of accidents that took hold on this planet would do so in exactly the same way, in the identical conditions on any other planet in another similar galaxy. So I doubt we’d have a clue what we were looking at. The “life” I believe exists elsewhere in the universe would confound as it would awe. If this small planet in this one galaxy in such a vast cosmos were the only place life existed, that infers something about life I wouldn’t know how to identify – but I’d be afraid to waste it.
Due to the great distances between stars it is most unlikely that we will ever encounter life other than our own. Though I am almost certain that life other than our own does exist somewhere, I am not concerned about possible life in other galaxies. Even the milky galaxy is more than we will ever, ever fully explore, assuming that we live long enough to even explore the nearest stars, which are very, very far away. Though it is not absolute, there is a very good possibility that life elsewhere would be carbon based, being that carbon is so abundant throughout the universe and so readily combines to form the basic blocks of life, as we know it. Of course, this does not mean that life elsewhere has to be based on carbon but it is certainly a good and obvious model.
Intelligent, technologically advanced life on other stars is even more unlikely but there are some basic requirements we would recognize. They must have big brains, or some sort of system for thought , storage and retrieval. They would have to have some sort of mobility and some sort of clutchable appendage, in the form of hands, tentacles, suckers, tendrils or something that could clutch, hold and manipulate objects in order to build, construct objects of technology. They would have to have some sort of vision and in some degree of clarity. This would not necessarily have to be of the ocular vision we have. It could be x-ray, infrared or any kind of sight that would allow them to distinguish objects, their environment and so on and so on.
As far as detecting life on other planets, we have the ability to detect the different elements of other galaxies, stars and planets so we could detect oxygen, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and gases from industrial production and pollution. I would think that would be a sure sign of intelligent and advanced life.
At any rate, I wouldn’t hold my breath until then and I wouldn’t bet on encountering any life form in many, many generations. It’s not that I’m a pessimist, it’s just that am a realist and understand and comprehend the great distances between the stars. Perhaps by the time we can bridge these great distances we will be socially advanced enough to understand it all, but I have doubt. It is my belief that if we do cross the barriers of time and space it will probably be to make war, probably for profit.
nightlight, your points are valid, but there’s one you omitted: what if there’s a civilization out there vastly older than us — 1 or 2 million years, say — that has discovered a way to propel a spaceship at some appreciable fraction of the speed of light — 10% or better? — and built an “ark” to explore? They might come to us. Of course, they might give us a miss, but they might let us know they’re in the neighborhood, even if they cruise on quickly.