Saturday Morning Science 15
Arsenic and Old Life– I grew up reading science fiction and was introduced at a young age to the idea that life might have a different chemical basis than the standard arrangement based on carbon. Silicon based life was already a cliché long before I saw the old classic Star Trek episode The Devil in the Dark wherein a Federation mining colony is terrorised by a life-form that could ingest rock and move through solid matter as if it were swimming in water. I remember asking my father, a chemical engineer, if he thought that this might be a possibility. His answer was simply; wouldn’t we see examples of these forms of life around us? As a kid I was not inclined to disagree but I wondered if he really understood the question. I thought the idea behind life having a different chemistry as being an attempt to imagine biology in extreme environments and that you would need a stable, planet wide set of conditions to get something as complex as life to establish itself. It seems some scientists view the problem more the way my father did.
From the announcement back in 1996 that a meteor from Mars contained fossil bacteria to the current debate about the “arsenic-based” life found on the salty shores of Mono Lake in California the claims and counter claims appear to bounce around inconclusively. The news media favours assertions to refutations so one tends to be exposed to more possibilities than conclusions.
The idea that the discovery of life beyond the Earth would lead to a sudden and profound change in human society looks now to be rather exaggerated. With the exception of Orson Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast in 1938, we are pretty much passed the point of mass hysteria. I’m not going to say that the sudden appearance of an alien armada in near Earth space wouldn’t start up a repeat performance but it’s unlikely that’s how the first evidence for extraterrestrial life is going to make itself known. With all of the false or inconclusive starts that exobiology has had the average consumer of news has also had a pretty good chance to develop an immunity system that can deal with this brand of meme.
Some readers will have noticed that I’m not including UFO’s in this. Yes, that’s what I’m doing and here’s why. By the end of this year, it is estimated that there will be 5 billion active cell phone subscriptions on this planet. Of that number, over half will be equipped with cameras. Then let’s add in every surveillance camera not pointing at the ground. You can see where this is going, yes? Our stock of credible images of UFO’s hasn’t increased by the same amount as our ability to record them. The number of great fakes has definitely increased with the availability of and skilled user base for various Adobe products but credible pictures of alien space ships are no more common now than in the 1960s in proportion to our ability to capture them .
In addition to our ability to take images on the fly, the active surveillance of the night sky has increased and not just because of the active paranoia of any one government. We’re talking about the day to day work of various commercial and scientific organisations as well. If there’s an active cover-up going on you would require an international security apparatus that is so large and with so many field offices and agents that it would rival the absurdity of the old East German Stasi apparatus which basically had one citizen in every seven spying on the other six. How long could that many people keep a secret?
Before people start sending me links to various YouTube videos, relax, I’ve seen them. And for the most part it really is just “lights in the sky”. Some of it is fascinating but none of it looks conclusively extraterrestrial. Alien in the original sense of the word. Here are a few of my favourites:
UFO Haiti– Still the best for overall audacity. Check out barzolff814’s You Tube channel. This guy is good. Long after he ‘fessed up to the hoax the rubes still line up for this one and it has most recently resurfaced as “UFO Saudi”. It’s the palm trees, yes?
UFO-New York – The art of the good hoax is detail and the blurring of detail. Here’s the original SciFi Channel promo. Cut the head and tail titles and you have the item that ran as a news piece on Japanese television and then recirculated back to the States through the UFO fan networks as the real thing.
Keep Watching the Skies– Courtesy of Live Leaks. This one is typical of the kind of stuff that gets re-purposed by the UFO fans. Looks pretty good too. I love the crowd gathering at the end. Now go and look up the date on the camera May 22, 2009. The second light in the picture is the spent first stage of the rocket. Mulder was right, the truth is out there.
UFO yes, Spaceship, no way– Alison Kruse purchased a night vision scope and started recording the weird stuff in the night sky around her. I think she’s caught some real head scratchers. No cosmic emissaries from Zeta Reticuli but definitely some funny stuff. Enjoy.
Okay enough with the tabloid material. Back to the serious high minded review of the possible nature of life in the universe. Courtesy of National Geographic a lengthy and near exhaustive article by Joel Achenbach, Life Beyond the Earth. Wading through over a century of false starts and our current research targets this one is time well spent if you want see just how far we’ve come in redefining the possible environments under which life can flourish.
As for redefining the mechanisms at the heart of life, it looks as if a complete description must take into account quantum effects. In its origins and as to what more advanced forms of life might involve, the effects of quantum physics could seriously change the “what” in what we are looking for as life on Earth and elsewhere. From Nature News, a fascinating article by Philip Ball, The Physics of Life looks at sub-micro and large scale examples about how biology and physics are becoming “entangled”.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Kim Cascone for some very interesting links.
