NASA is holding a press conference today to discuss some sort of discovery in astrobiology, there’s a great deal of speculation as to what it may or may not be.
Could it be that NASA has discovered evidence of life in the universe besides us? Are they benevolent or malevolent, wise or unreasonable? Are they more advanced than us or are they simply animals?
It was recently discovered that one of the moons around Saturn has an atmosphere that would be suitable for life, have we discovered more about this moon? Is this moon a prime target, is it going to be a paradise away from home?
A problem about alien life is that you never know how the alien life is going to react to us. They may very well be hostile, we may encounter something akin to when Europeans first came to America. Maybe the aliens are benevolent though, and teach us new things that advance our technology hundreds of years in a matter of months.
The other possibility is that the aliens aren’t intelligent and are still just animals without sentience. This could be just as interesting, we may find aliens that secrete useful substances, or aliens that have adapted and evolved in interesting ways, leading us to new scientific developments. Perhaps we’ll find new medicine from new plants on alien worlds.
But with alien life you never know how they’ve evolved, so you never know what may be fatal to them. If life were to somehow sprout up on a dry planet, it could very well be fatal to them to have water in the atmosphere. I could picture an organism used to living on a dry hot planet that arrives on earth, has water soak into its lungs and the lungs turn to mush.
Going back to the example of the Europeans coming to America for the first time they may bring a whole host of diseases that we have no immunity to, or vice versa. Perhaps we may kill off each other’s entire species trading viruses to one another. Stephen Hawking is one scientist who equates aliens coming here to the Europeans arriving in America.
Picturing little green men isn’t very realistic though, it’s unknown how other life forms would have evolved so we really have no concept of what they would look like. Picture an alien race coming from a planet with ten times the gravity of earth, if they came here their strength would be astronomical compared to ours, though they would likely be much smaller than us. They don’t necessarily need to be a humanoid, they could be some other kind of creature and don’t need to have hands.
With how enormous the universe is, it’s very vain for us to think we’re the only life out there. Mathematically there’s got to be at least one other life form out there, is it possible that the odds are much higher than we thought?
