The Misconception of Alien Life in Outer Space
Our planet teems with such diversity of life that it is difficult to recognize some organisms as even being alive. That complexity hints at the challenge of searching for life as we don’t know it – the alien biology that might have taken hold on other planets, where conditions could be unlike anything we’ve seen before. “The Universe is a really big place. Chances are, if we can imagine it, it’s probably out there on a planet somewhere.” For decades, astronomers have come at that question by confining their search to organisms broadly similar to the ones here on Earth. In 1976, NASA’s Viking landers examined soil samples on Mars, and tried to animate them using the same kind of organic nutrients that Earth microbes like, they ended up with inconclusive results. But this is only the beginning. Later this year, ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter will begin scoping out methane in the Martian atmosphere which could be produced by Earth-like bacterial life. NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will likewise scan for carbon-based compounds from possible past or present Mars organisms. But the environment on Mars isn’t much like that on Earth, and the exoplanets that astronomers are finding around other stars are stranger and far different still – many of them quite unlike anything in our solar system, many of them different from anything we could imagine. For that reason, it’s important to broaden the search for life. We need to open our minds to genuinely alien kinds of biological, chemical, geological and physical processes. ‘Everybody looks for “biosignatures”, but they’re meaningless because we don’t have any other examples of biology,’ other than that on earth.
via YouTube https://youtu.be/1nR6Y_pO2tQ
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