We May Have Found Aliens, And Not Known It
Mon, Apr 21, 2008
Environmental Graffiti Will be Changing Dramatically Soon. Get a Sneak Preview By Signing Up Here.
Mankind has always been curious about the possibility that “we’re not the only ones in the universe.” A great deal of effort has been spent on the attempt to find extraterrestrial life. Unfortunately for us, we may not even know what we’re looking for.
Image from Sea Frost
The New Scientist says that life is so incredibly hard to define that we may never know if it’s out there.
Citing over 280 definitions of life–all of which miss the point somewhat– Sohan Jeeta, an astrobiologist, floated his own definition this week at an astrobiology conference:
“Life is a thermodynamically open chemical system with a semi-permeable boundary. It contains an information-based complex system with emergent properties, part of which drives a metabolism based on a proton gradient. The said gradient generates the necessary potential difference across the semi-permeable boundary. The information is heritable and coded in such a way as to allow variation and thus evolution.”
Schoolchildren all over the world are rejoicing over the possibility of this being on a test. But why does life need a definition?
Because without one, we won’t know if what we find out in interstellar space is indeed life. The vast differences in environment would obviously create a form that’s almost entirely unrecognizable to us. Looking for amino acids, or any other essentials to life on earth, would leave us missing the point with something that’s adapted to a completely different world.
First defining life, and in the most open-ended manner possible, is the only way to design experiments and instrumentation to be able to look for aliens. Unless, of course, they show up and try to kill us. That’s always an option, too.
Environmental Graffiti is up for four bloggers’ choice awards. You can vote for us for best entertainment blog, best blog of all time, best geek blog and best animal blogger.
If you want to find out all the latest news on the environment, why not subscribe to our RSS feed? We’ll even throw in a free album.
You Might Also Like Our Friends' Posts From the Intertubes
“The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else.”
April 21st, 2008 at 5:51 pm
“The vast differences in environment would obviously create a form that’s almost entirely unrecognizable to us. Looking for amino acids, or any other essentials to life on earth, would leave us missing the point with something that’s adapted to a completely different world.”
i don’t think is as obvious as you imply. given the vastly greater propensity for carbon to bond to itself and other compounds in very long chains — its nearest competition is silicon, a member of the same chemical family but far inferior in its abilities to combine.
sure, the universe is staggeringly huge… but to argue that anything is possible is to float free of the empirical. could a world that shares the same laws of thermodynamics and rules of chemistry, that supports complex living things, truly be so “completely different” from our own?
April 21st, 2008 at 8:50 pm
I think what the article is trying to say is to open your mind to the possibility of different life forms outside of the carbon-based box we live in. ie: Anti-matter/dark matter life or something just as foreign for us to understand.
Just because we can’t define it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
My two cents worth.
April 22nd, 2008 at 2:15 am
oh, i get that part. my mind is open to the possibility; the sci-fi that immediately springs to mind involves sagan’s floating jupiterian creatures (non-terrestrial though ultimately carbon-based), and of course the near god-like energy beings of clarke’s “2001: a space odyssey” — maybe even the anti-hero of every “aliens” movie. indeed, interstellar space is about as alien and hostile a place as we’d want to visit, so “life” may take on a whole new meaning out there, quite literally. whatever. all i’m saying is that, wild speculations aside, and given what is known about how the the planet earth and the forces that form(ed) it affect whether and how life evolves, the chances of something like “life” developing from a substance other than carbon seems vanishingly small.