Aliens Among Us

The other day, I read an article in Popular Science that scientists have discovered alien life. And they didn’t find it on some other planet, a moon or an asteroid; they found it right here on Earth.

Now, don’t get your nerves tied in knots. They found bacteria that is definitely alive, but isn’t life as we know it. Yeah, that old disclaimer. How many times have we heard some scientist say, “Well, if we do find life on ____, it certainly won’t be life as we know it.”?

And they didn’t even have to go off this world to find examples of life as we don’t know it.

When I was growing up, some of my favorite authors wrote about all sorts of aliens, from 3-legged, 3-gendered crabs to creatures where the male was about 1/8th the size of the female, attached himself to her, and his only purpose was to father children. And some tried to imagine creatures that didn’t use biology as we knew it, rock creatures that could move through the soil of their planet, crystals, intelligent energy.

I found them all great fun to read.

What’s so alien about this bacteria they’ve discovered? It doesn’t have the type of biology we are familiar with. It doesn’t eat carbohydrates or protein, and it doesn’t expel the type of waste products an animal or plant would. One strain eats electricity, or rather, electrons. Another expels electrons as waste.

Yes, there are probably several types of these ‘alien’ bacterium. Based on this article, at least two strains have been named, with one graduate student trying to culture at least 20 more. Even that has to be done differently, because it doesn’t grow on petri dishes. You have to supply an electrode of some kind. Or something that they would see as food.

They aren’t really aliens. They are part of Earth’s eco-system, and have been for billions of years. But they are alien from us, even more than the creatures that grow in the super-heated vents of water rising from underwater volcanoes.

That old phrase, ‘life as we know it’, always did irritate me. We would be on a different planet, so why would we expect to find Old MacDonald and Betsy the cow? Why not keep our minds open to all sorts of possibilities, and just see what’s out there?

Something a little smarter than bacteria, I hope.

Pluto & Company

Sometimes, reading science fills my imagination.

Remember when Pluto was declared NOT a planet? Mercury is also tiny, I objected. Turns out, Pluto’s diameter is half of Mercury’s. They are both small, but that is a significant difference. Still, they have decided Pluto IS a planet, although they stuck ‘dwarf’ in front. I didn’t realize that until today.

Pluto has a moon. Charon is big enough, compared to Pluto, that it doesn’t revolve around Pluto; they both revolve around a point between them. Weird. I don’t know of any other planet & moon that does that. Today, I discovered Pluto has 4 additional moons. Way to go, Pluto!

There are other dwarf planets in our system, way out in the nether regions, so Pluto is not alone. At least 3 have names. Our system has more planets than the 9 I grew up learning about.

Pluto has an atmosphere. What? How can it? It’s so tiny, so little gravity, so cold- Some times. When Pluto gets closer to the sun (it comes within Neptune’s orbit), some of the surface thaws into a thin atmosphere, mostly nitrogen with methane and carbon monoxide for flavor. When it’s not that close, that atmosphere freezes and falls to the ground.

In 2006, NASA launched a probe for Pluto. It woke up in December 2014, and is seeing if it needs to correct its trajectory. In July 2015, it will reach a point 6,000 miles from Pluto, and it will snap pictures and take readings as fast as it can. At some point after that, it will send its observations to Earth. Just think, if you had snuck onto that spacecraft just before it launched, you’d... Well, you’d be dead, because it wasn’t built for passengers, but your body would almost be there to not see it for yourself!

The most interesting bit of today’s research was that frozen dwarf planets may be the most numerous type of planet in the universe. Really? I figure we should set up bases on/in ours. Why would we want to? Once we figure out how to colonize Pluto and its cohorts, we would know how to colonize frozen dwarf planets in other systems; to study, to serve as a base, a stepping stone.

Yeah, when I dream, I can dream big. I got that from the science fiction I read as a kid.

What do you think? If you were designing a colony for Pluto, would you build on the surface or dig inside?