mojo
02-29-2008, 11:28 AM
Weirdo aliens.
I've often thought this myself.
Why do we presume that alien life will necessarily be similar in its needs to ourselves or other of earth's animals/organisms.
I remember reading an excellent short story about humans landing on Pluto and tromping around the place and generally making a nuisance of themselves. It is only much later that they discover that these pretty little snowflake type things lying all over the planet that they were stomping through were actually lifeforms that they destroyed.
You can just see us doing something like this can't you.
We know so little about ourselves and our own enviroment that it amazes me that we could even begin to think what life on other planets may be like.
Not only the life forms speculated on in the linked article, but can you imagine gigantic gaseous animals floating in the outer atmosheres of gas giant planets. Or organisms that live in the bottoms of volcanoes. What would a creature that lived on a high gravity world look like, or a water locked world. Could there be life forms that can exist in the vacuum of space? How about silicon creatures, or crystalline, or............
Anyway here's the article.
Alien Life May Be "Weirder" Than Scientists Think, Report Says (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070706-weird-aliens.html)
Instead of thriving on water, extraterrestrial organisms might live in a sea of liquid methane. Or instead of getting energy from the sun, they might thrive on hydrochloric acid. snip........
The report concludes that scientists need to consider an expanded list of characteristics that define life, including so-called "weird" life-forms that may thrive where Earth organisms couldn't.
Page 2 (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070706-weird-aliens_2.html)
Since these characteristics make life on Earth possible, scientists have long assumed they are required for life elsewhere in the universe.
But advances in biology and biochemistry in the last decade show that the basic requirements for life may not be so concrete, according to Baross.
For example, he said, the Viking lander missions to Mars in the 1970s were controversial, because although they did not find life, they only looked for Earthlike life.
Link to the related article on the Viking mission (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/10/061023-mars-life.html)
The Viking Mars mission may have missed signs of life when it visited the red planet 30 years ago, a new study suggests.
If future missions are to set the record straight, the study's authors add, scientists may need to change the ways in which they search.
"We simulated these [tests] that Viking did 30 years ago, this time in extreme regions of our own planet," said Rafael Navarro-Gonzalez, of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City.
"We found low levels of organic compounds in those soils, but we cannot detect them by the same technologies used by the Viking mission."
Page 2 (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/10/061023-mars-life_2.html)
Possible Martian life-forms now include a newly discovered class of microorganisms on Earth that can survive and even reproduce at 30 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 1 degree Celsius)€”below the freezing point of water.
The cold-resistant life-forms fascinate scientists, because frigid planets like Mars are far more common in our galaxy than warmer worlds.
Related article on the ice lake discovered on Mars (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/08/0802_050802_mars_ice.html)
Scientists Finding Strange Life Forms in Great Salt Lake (http://tv.ksl.com/index.php?nid=5&sid=97513)
Westminster, the University of Maryland and George Mason University are not only finding life where life shouldn't exist, but life, perhaps like nothing of this earth.
Instead of the rods, spheres and spiral shapes microbiologists are familiar with, they're seeing organisms shaped like pyramids, triangles, squares and crescents.
Related article on life in the Atacama desert, the driest place on Earth (http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0308/feature3/)
Link to artistic impressions of what some different life forms may take, just scroll through the 6 pictures (http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/extraterrestrial/gallery_06.html)
Flying Whales, Other Aliens Theorized by Scientists (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/05/0520_050520_tv_aliens.html)
One side of the planet is draped in eternal freezing darkness, the other side is bathed in permanent starlight.
Fields of "stinger fans"€”animals that look like tall plants€”cover the floodplains. Other strange species abound, from giraffe-like predators called gulphogs to tiny flesh-dissolving tadpoles known as hysteria.
Distant Planets Could Have Plants of "Alien" Colors (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/04/070412-alien-planets.html)
Related article by Dr. Seth Shostak (http://blogs2.nationalgeographic.com/extraterrestrial/archives/2005/05/will_intelligen.html)
In fact, as a tour of any zoo will convince you, there€™s a breathtakingly wide variety of creature designs that work on our planet €“ and presumably on theirs, too. So why would intelligent extraterrestrial life look anything like us? Probably it wouldn€™t, although there€™s a mechanism known to biologists as €œconvergent evolution€ that argues for at least a bit of a resemblance.
But it€™s a bit extreme to maintain that we are the best design, and therefore convergent evolution will ensure that an intelligent alien looks like your brother-in-law. After all, an extra set of arms might be useful, as would an eye in the back of our heads. A double spine might allow faster and easier walking, and a few extra digits on each hand could make for better tool use or piano playing. The bottom line is that any biological creature we find that€™s at least as clever as we are might have, some features in common with us (two eyes, instead of one, for instance). But there€™s little reason to think our own design is so wonderfully optimal that all thinking beings will have converged on it.
Link to cool interactive video (http://www.nationalgeographic.com/channel/extraterrestrial/main_launch.html)
I sure hope that when we do master space travel ( if we havent already, John, ;) ) that we treat the worlds we visit with the utmost respect and take as much care as possible to protect any lifeforms that may exist on other planets from our usual gung-ho attitude to exploration.
Consider how we decimated our own species when europeans first passed on diseases to indigenous populations during exploration and discovery of our own world.
Consider the damage we could do on Alien worlds, or i guess, what alien microbes or bacteria could do to us.
Life in extreme enviroments (http://www.resa.net/nasa/antarctica.htm), also lots of other good links at the bottom of this page.
Take the discovery of a huge body of -liquid- water four kilometers under the ice of Antarctica. This "lake" is 250 kilometers long by 40 wides and is 400 meters deep: approximately the size of Lake Ontario! Confirmed in 1996, this discovery came at a time when the Galileo Orbiter was sending back the most intriguing images of Europa - which have led to the current hypothesis that Europa harbors a liquid or perhaps "slushy" ocean beneath its icy crust.
Ice samples from cores drilled close to the top of the lake have been analysed to be as old as 420,000 years, suggesting that the lake has been sealed under the icecap for between 500,000 and more than a million years.
Biologists suspect that there may be life forms that have been unaffected by surface conditions for up to a million year, making Lake Vostok an invaluable, living biological museum.
At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the Galileo Mission, a project has been initiated to probe the waters of Lake Vostok for life - a model for a possible mission to Europa.
www.astrobio.net (http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2390&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0), an excellent article, ive snipped some interesting bits if you dont want to read the whole thing.
The committee that wrote the report found that the fundamental requirements for life as we generally know it -- a liquid water biosolvent, carbon-based metabolism, molecular system capable of evolution, and the ability to exchange energy with the environment -- are not the only ways to support phenomena recognized as life.
The assumption that life requires water, for example, has limited thinking about likely habitats on Mars to those places where liquid water is thought to be present or have once flowed, such as the deep subsurface.
However, according to the committee, liquids such as ammonia or formamide could also work as biosolvents -- liquids that dissolve substances within an organism -- albeit through a different biochemistry. The recent evidence that liquid water-ammonia mixtures may exist in the interior of Saturn's moon Titan suggests that increased priority be given to a follow-on mission to probe Titan, a locale the committee considers the solar system's most likely home for weird life.
Additionally, studies in chemistry show that an organism could utilize energy from alternative sources, such as through a reaction of sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid, meaning that such an organism could have an entirely non-carbon-based metabolism.
So what these guy's are saying is, Yes, we do need to rethink the way that we view what shape, form, environment and energy is needed to harbour life.
OK, conjecture time.
Why would an intelligent alien need to have toolmaking ability.
An enormous gaseous amoeba type of creature floating in a gas giant planets atmoshere would have no need of toolmaking. It is able to interact with its enviroment by creating electricity within its body, it is the top of the food chain, it spends its life (lets say 1000years) floating around in social groups discussing mathematics or algebra, how much more advanced in that particular area of intelligence would that creature be.
Found an article that originated as a press release from the Institute of Physics and is now on www.astrobio.net (http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2434&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0)
Summary (Aug 21, 2007): Physicists have discovered life-like structures that form from inorganic substances in space. The findings hint at the possibility that life beyond Earth may not necessarily use carbon-based molecules as its building blocks.
"These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter," says Tsytovich, "they are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve".
They are suggesting that life may in fact not need to be carbon based, or even organic!! Thats a seriously cool theory.
Seems to me to be a rash of interesting articles and research being released lately dealing not only with the possibility of life being found elsewhere but exactly what form of biology that life may be like.
Another article on the possibility's of life being found in extreme enviroments, though this deals only with bacterial forms.
news.nationalgeographic page 1 (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/08/070827-frozen-dna.html)
The work suggests that if bacterial life existed on Mars or on Jupiter's moon Europa, it might still survive locked in icy soils.
news.nationalgeographic page 2 (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/08/070827-frozen-dna_2.html)
But in the much colder environments of Mars or Europa, life might be able to survive while frozen for much longer, Willerslev said.
At those lower temperatures, DNA damage would accumulate more slowly.
So the new results "could suggest that if you had similar life on Mars, it could exist for much longer," he said.
So maybe were not that far away from creating our own "weirdo lookin' alien life".
Artificial Life Likely in 3 to 10 Years (http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/08/19/national/a173438D04.DTL)
Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of "wet artificial life."
This is intersting too.
www.timesonline (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2241753.ece)
SCIENTISTS have discovered that inorganic material can take on the characteristics of living organisms in space, a development that could transform views of alien life.
Any thoughts on this?
think outside the box
mojo
I've often thought this myself.
Why do we presume that alien life will necessarily be similar in its needs to ourselves or other of earth's animals/organisms.
I remember reading an excellent short story about humans landing on Pluto and tromping around the place and generally making a nuisance of themselves. It is only much later that they discover that these pretty little snowflake type things lying all over the planet that they were stomping through were actually lifeforms that they destroyed.
You can just see us doing something like this can't you.
We know so little about ourselves and our own enviroment that it amazes me that we could even begin to think what life on other planets may be like.
Not only the life forms speculated on in the linked article, but can you imagine gigantic gaseous animals floating in the outer atmosheres of gas giant planets. Or organisms that live in the bottoms of volcanoes. What would a creature that lived on a high gravity world look like, or a water locked world. Could there be life forms that can exist in the vacuum of space? How about silicon creatures, or crystalline, or............
Anyway here's the article.
Alien Life May Be "Weirder" Than Scientists Think, Report Says (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070706-weird-aliens.html)
Instead of thriving on water, extraterrestrial organisms might live in a sea of liquid methane. Or instead of getting energy from the sun, they might thrive on hydrochloric acid. snip........
The report concludes that scientists need to consider an expanded list of characteristics that define life, including so-called "weird" life-forms that may thrive where Earth organisms couldn't.
Page 2 (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070706-weird-aliens_2.html)
Since these characteristics make life on Earth possible, scientists have long assumed they are required for life elsewhere in the universe.
But advances in biology and biochemistry in the last decade show that the basic requirements for life may not be so concrete, according to Baross.
For example, he said, the Viking lander missions to Mars in the 1970s were controversial, because although they did not find life, they only looked for Earthlike life.
Link to the related article on the Viking mission (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/10/061023-mars-life.html)
The Viking Mars mission may have missed signs of life when it visited the red planet 30 years ago, a new study suggests.
If future missions are to set the record straight, the study's authors add, scientists may need to change the ways in which they search.
"We simulated these [tests] that Viking did 30 years ago, this time in extreme regions of our own planet," said Rafael Navarro-Gonzalez, of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City.
"We found low levels of organic compounds in those soils, but we cannot detect them by the same technologies used by the Viking mission."
Page 2 (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/10/061023-mars-life_2.html)
Possible Martian life-forms now include a newly discovered class of microorganisms on Earth that can survive and even reproduce at 30 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 1 degree Celsius)€”below the freezing point of water.
The cold-resistant life-forms fascinate scientists, because frigid planets like Mars are far more common in our galaxy than warmer worlds.
Related article on the ice lake discovered on Mars (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/08/0802_050802_mars_ice.html)
Scientists Finding Strange Life Forms in Great Salt Lake (http://tv.ksl.com/index.php?nid=5&sid=97513)
Westminster, the University of Maryland and George Mason University are not only finding life where life shouldn't exist, but life, perhaps like nothing of this earth.
Instead of the rods, spheres and spiral shapes microbiologists are familiar with, they're seeing organisms shaped like pyramids, triangles, squares and crescents.
Related article on life in the Atacama desert, the driest place on Earth (http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0308/feature3/)
Link to artistic impressions of what some different life forms may take, just scroll through the 6 pictures (http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/extraterrestrial/gallery_06.html)
Flying Whales, Other Aliens Theorized by Scientists (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/05/0520_050520_tv_aliens.html)
One side of the planet is draped in eternal freezing darkness, the other side is bathed in permanent starlight.
Fields of "stinger fans"€”animals that look like tall plants€”cover the floodplains. Other strange species abound, from giraffe-like predators called gulphogs to tiny flesh-dissolving tadpoles known as hysteria.
Distant Planets Could Have Plants of "Alien" Colors (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/04/070412-alien-planets.html)
Related article by Dr. Seth Shostak (http://blogs2.nationalgeographic.com/extraterrestrial/archives/2005/05/will_intelligen.html)
In fact, as a tour of any zoo will convince you, there€™s a breathtakingly wide variety of creature designs that work on our planet €“ and presumably on theirs, too. So why would intelligent extraterrestrial life look anything like us? Probably it wouldn€™t, although there€™s a mechanism known to biologists as €œconvergent evolution€ that argues for at least a bit of a resemblance.
But it€™s a bit extreme to maintain that we are the best design, and therefore convergent evolution will ensure that an intelligent alien looks like your brother-in-law. After all, an extra set of arms might be useful, as would an eye in the back of our heads. A double spine might allow faster and easier walking, and a few extra digits on each hand could make for better tool use or piano playing. The bottom line is that any biological creature we find that€™s at least as clever as we are might have, some features in common with us (two eyes, instead of one, for instance). But there€™s little reason to think our own design is so wonderfully optimal that all thinking beings will have converged on it.
Link to cool interactive video (http://www.nationalgeographic.com/channel/extraterrestrial/main_launch.html)
I sure hope that when we do master space travel ( if we havent already, John, ;) ) that we treat the worlds we visit with the utmost respect and take as much care as possible to protect any lifeforms that may exist on other planets from our usual gung-ho attitude to exploration.
Consider how we decimated our own species when europeans first passed on diseases to indigenous populations during exploration and discovery of our own world.
Consider the damage we could do on Alien worlds, or i guess, what alien microbes or bacteria could do to us.
Life in extreme enviroments (http://www.resa.net/nasa/antarctica.htm), also lots of other good links at the bottom of this page.
Take the discovery of a huge body of -liquid- water four kilometers under the ice of Antarctica. This "lake" is 250 kilometers long by 40 wides and is 400 meters deep: approximately the size of Lake Ontario! Confirmed in 1996, this discovery came at a time when the Galileo Orbiter was sending back the most intriguing images of Europa - which have led to the current hypothesis that Europa harbors a liquid or perhaps "slushy" ocean beneath its icy crust.
Ice samples from cores drilled close to the top of the lake have been analysed to be as old as 420,000 years, suggesting that the lake has been sealed under the icecap for between 500,000 and more than a million years.
Biologists suspect that there may be life forms that have been unaffected by surface conditions for up to a million year, making Lake Vostok an invaluable, living biological museum.
At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the Galileo Mission, a project has been initiated to probe the waters of Lake Vostok for life - a model for a possible mission to Europa.
www.astrobio.net (http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2390&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0), an excellent article, ive snipped some interesting bits if you dont want to read the whole thing.
The committee that wrote the report found that the fundamental requirements for life as we generally know it -- a liquid water biosolvent, carbon-based metabolism, molecular system capable of evolution, and the ability to exchange energy with the environment -- are not the only ways to support phenomena recognized as life.
The assumption that life requires water, for example, has limited thinking about likely habitats on Mars to those places where liquid water is thought to be present or have once flowed, such as the deep subsurface.
However, according to the committee, liquids such as ammonia or formamide could also work as biosolvents -- liquids that dissolve substances within an organism -- albeit through a different biochemistry. The recent evidence that liquid water-ammonia mixtures may exist in the interior of Saturn's moon Titan suggests that increased priority be given to a follow-on mission to probe Titan, a locale the committee considers the solar system's most likely home for weird life.
Additionally, studies in chemistry show that an organism could utilize energy from alternative sources, such as through a reaction of sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid, meaning that such an organism could have an entirely non-carbon-based metabolism.
So what these guy's are saying is, Yes, we do need to rethink the way that we view what shape, form, environment and energy is needed to harbour life.
OK, conjecture time.
Why would an intelligent alien need to have toolmaking ability.
An enormous gaseous amoeba type of creature floating in a gas giant planets atmoshere would have no need of toolmaking. It is able to interact with its enviroment by creating electricity within its body, it is the top of the food chain, it spends its life (lets say 1000years) floating around in social groups discussing mathematics or algebra, how much more advanced in that particular area of intelligence would that creature be.
Found an article that originated as a press release from the Institute of Physics and is now on www.astrobio.net (http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2434&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0)
Summary (Aug 21, 2007): Physicists have discovered life-like structures that form from inorganic substances in space. The findings hint at the possibility that life beyond Earth may not necessarily use carbon-based molecules as its building blocks.
"These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter," says Tsytovich, "they are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve".
They are suggesting that life may in fact not need to be carbon based, or even organic!! Thats a seriously cool theory.
Seems to me to be a rash of interesting articles and research being released lately dealing not only with the possibility of life being found elsewhere but exactly what form of biology that life may be like.
Another article on the possibility's of life being found in extreme enviroments, though this deals only with bacterial forms.
news.nationalgeographic page 1 (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/08/070827-frozen-dna.html)
The work suggests that if bacterial life existed on Mars or on Jupiter's moon Europa, it might still survive locked in icy soils.
news.nationalgeographic page 2 (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/08/070827-frozen-dna_2.html)
But in the much colder environments of Mars or Europa, life might be able to survive while frozen for much longer, Willerslev said.
At those lower temperatures, DNA damage would accumulate more slowly.
So the new results "could suggest that if you had similar life on Mars, it could exist for much longer," he said.
So maybe were not that far away from creating our own "weirdo lookin' alien life".
Artificial Life Likely in 3 to 10 Years (http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/08/19/national/a173438D04.DTL)
Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of "wet artificial life."
This is intersting too.
www.timesonline (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2241753.ece)
SCIENTISTS have discovered that inorganic material can take on the characteristics of living organisms in space, a development that could transform views of alien life.
Any thoughts on this?
think outside the box
mojo