Let’s backtrack slightly. Just a couple of years back ‘Scientists’ had been exploring and studying deep ocean hydrothermal vents, when they were completely surprised to find the areas immediately around the vents were filed with life. The largest life form was apparently a tube worm that had formed a symbiotic relationship with a particular type of bacteria. Now the temperature of the water coming out of the vents varies from 68 degrees to as much as 600 degrees Fahrenheit. (Note to the discerning reader – water reaches the boiling point at 225 degrees Fahrenheit at sea-level, but near hydrothermal vents, the water coming out of the vents doesn’t boil due to the extreme hydrostatic pressure of all the overlying water – take two points away from yourself if you didn’t realise this! Actually, it is much the same principle as celebrity facelifts. The hydrostatic pressure from their drum tightened skin stops their plastic implants from bubbling under the strong Californian sunlight).
Now up until this point, scientists had presumed that such a community of diverse life forms, could not survive, far less thrive, in such an inhospitable environment. The bacteria (or is that ‘um’- um…I’m not sure) thrive on hydrogen sulfide, a gas which is released from the vents. The symbiotic bit (think Tories and Lib Dems here for a more precise definition of this) is that the tube worm’s insides are lined with the bacteria which then oxidises the hydrogen sulphide, thus turning it into usable nutrients for the worms. The bacteria gain because the worms supply blood which contains haemoglobin, which helps the bacteria to break down the sulfides. I do hope that you are reading this over breakfast.
Until the discovery of these bacteria , scientists didn’t believe it was possible for anything to survive in the extreme environment around deep ocean vents; and we’re told that the discovery of the deep-sea thermal vents and the life they support has completely changed the way we define life.
Now, let’s go forward in time to just a few months ago. Researchers conducting NASA funded astrobiology tests in the also inhospitable environment of Mono Lake in California discovered the first known microorganism on Earth able to thrive and reproduce using the toxic chemical arsenic. (Although some talent show judges may also fit that definition). Apparently the microorganism substitutes arsenic for phosphorus in its cell components.
“The definition of life has just expanded,” says Ed Weiler, NASA’s associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s Headquarters in Washington. “As we pursue our efforts to seek signs of life in the solar system, we have to think more broadly, more diversely and consider life as we do not know it.”
Quite recently we also heard that the one common denominator for life as we know it, and life as we don’t know it…is water. Water it would seem is the key. We can have many different variations of the environment within which life can survive, but water (according to current thinking) must be present. It also now seems that water is on the Moon, as ice; and is highly likely to have been on Mars and may well still be there, again in its frozen form, ice.
Fast forward now to a couple of days ago. We are told that a NASA scientist has produced research that may prove that extraterrestrial life could bear similar characteristics to the life we know on Earth. Dr. Richard B. Hoover, (didn’t he also invent the vacuum cleaner (?) or looking at his name again, perhaps it was a device intended for private use only) an astrobiologist with NASA’s Marshal Space Flight Center, has made these conclusions in a study which appeared in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology.
The story goes , Dr. Hoover travelled to some of the world’s most remote regions such as Siberia, Alaska, and Antarctica and gathered some of the rarest meteorites known to exist on the planet. He then extracted fossilized bacteria from the meteorites and now believes that they are the remains of living organisms which existed on the meteorites before they entered earth’s atmosphere.
With me so far? This slow leak of ideas and information is soooo boring and a bit of an insult. I think that some people must think that we are stupid. We are not Tom Cruise, we can handle the truth. There is extraterrestrial life. Yawn. This planet was seeded from elsewhere. Yawn.
No panic, no breakdown of law, order and religion. Yes, I think we’ve kinda guessed that given the fact that there are an awful lot of planets out there, and given the fact that the galaxy has been around for rather a long period of time, other life has evolved. And this doesn’t have to preclude the existence of God. In fact, she may have been involved!
And yes, we have seen the inexplicable UFO videos and accounts, (some accounts having again been recently released by the UK Government) so we do understand that the situation may be complex, for example, that it takes a species a little bit more advanced than a bacteria to fly one of these devices, (I hope that I’m not being a bacteriaist) so, come on. Just get it off your chest. We’ll cope. If Roswell, was real, if Close Encounters was an autobiography, if Men in Black was a documentary, we will live with it.
But where Governments will really get into trouble, where there will be a mass uprising, where people will riot and loot and generally enter a period of mass hysteria, is not if they’ve been keeping advanced technology like interstellar travel from us, or zero point energy devices, or a cure for the common cold, but, if Area 51 has, all this time, been being used to hide Marty McFly’s hoverboard! Then the s&&t will really hit the Stargate!
