Aliens in our midst

The alien autopsy was too obviously faked, but are we that far away from finding extra terrestrials? I bet within my lifetime.

Hooray!

Earth-like planets with life-sustaining conditions are spinning around stars in our galactic neighborhood, US astrophysicists say. They just haven’t been found yet.

In a talk given by astrophysicist Alan Boss at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he told his fellow scientists that two new satellites (Kepler and Corot) would have a great chance of finding these new Earths and analysing their atmospheres:

The images from those new planets, he added, should identify “light from their atmosphere and tell us if they have perhaps methane and oxygen. That will be pretty strong proof they are not only habitable but actually are inhabited.”

“I am not talking about a planet with intelligence on it. I simply say if you have a habitable world … sitting there, with the right temperature with water for a billion years, something is going to come out of it.

“At least we will have microbes,” said Boss.

Not good enough for you? Other scientists think that the aliens are already here — among us, hidden from view beneath our very noses:

No, not like that! Aliens could be living among us as a “shadow ecosystem,” based not on carbon and DNA, but using arsenic, say:

If we do discover exotic life unrelated to ours, it might not have developed here, Davies said. Instead, it might have originated elsewhere, then hitchhiked to Earth by piggybacking on a meteorite.

But it doesn’t matter where it originated, Davies argued, because it’s still an indication that life has cropped up from scratch in more than one place.

“If it’s happened more than once in the Solar System, then the Universe will be teeming with life,” said Davies.

Science fiction, every now and then, likes to experiment with silicon-based life. Silicon, if you remember your periodic table, is right below carbon, which means that you could have very similar structures to the carbon-based ones that we’re used to, only with slightly weaker atomic bonds. Similarly, sulfur would replace oxygen (there’s a mildly length Wikipedia article on the subject, if you’re interested).

I don’t need Little Green Men coming down in flying saucers, I’d just love to find some kind of life on other planets.