DISCOVERY NEWS– For the past 50 years, scientists have scoured the skies for radio signals
from beyond our planet, hoping for some sign of extraterrestrial
life. But one physicist says there’s no reason alien life couldn’t already
be lurking among us — or maybe even in us.
Paul Davies, an award-winning Arizona State University physicist known for his popular science writing said Tuesday that life may have developed on Earth not once but several times.
Davies said the variant life forms — most likely tiny microbes — could still be hanging around “right under our noses — or even in our noses.”
“How do we know all life on Earth descended from a single origin?” he told a conference at London’s prestigious Royal Society, which serves as Britain’s academy of sciences. “We’ve just scratched the surface of the microbial world.”
The idea that alien micro-organisms could be hiding out here on Earth has been discussed for a while, according to Jill Tarter, the director of the U.S. SETI project, which listens for signals from civilizations based around distant stars.
She said several of the scientists involved in the project were interested in pursuing the notion, which Davies earlier laid out in a 2007 article published in Scientific American in which he asked: “Are aliens among us?”
So far, there’s no answer. And ever finding one would be fraught with difficulties, as Davies himself acknowledged.
Continue reading about Alien Life May Already Be on Earth, Scientist Says.
© Discovery Communications, LLC, 2010
Photo by flickr user Kaibara87
Why not? If my memory serves me right, a couple of decades ago, astronomers and biologists figured that there seemed to enough organic materials in space that the first amino-acids probably came to Earth from space. This time, we would be talking of something much more improbable: microbes traveling through space, falling on Earth, and managing to live there.
Indeed, it looks incredible, but with enough time and enough microscopic living things in space, who knows?
Love,