If we found alien life, would we know it?
An artist's concept of a 'waterworld,' one of many different types of planets we may find in our search for undiscovered and habitable planets in the universe. Photo: Doug Bowman
NASA has searched for extraterrestrial life in our solar system. Someday we might encounter life on distant worlds, perhaps one of the three earthlike planets in orbit around the nearby star Glise 581. But what if it’s so different from life on Earth that we can’t recognize it?
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.
Searching space for weird life
Listen to a 5-minute podcast with Steven Benner, who is helping NASA define ‘extraterrestrial life.’
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?
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
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.