If we find alien life in our solar system - what then?
Finding extraterrestrial life close to home would be a new beginning - with new questions
Where is that primordial soup…and what’s in it? Photo by Dan Meyers, Unsplash.
Approx. 600 words; four minutes read time
In my childhood, I clung to anything extraterrestrial - in books, television, and film. I often fantasized about creatures from other worlds and incorporated them into my art and play. To this day, I long for the discovery of alien life.
But the realities of our universe - its extremes and great expanse - have tempered my expectations. I now know the chance of "little gray men" plopping down from above is unlikely. And our ability to go and explore other worlds beyond our solar system is unlikelier still (for now, anyway).
Our best chance for discovering alien life is not in a far-off star system. No, we are more likely to find life in our cosmic backyard - in our solar system. The quest to discover a bacterium on Mars or Europa, or even in the clouds above Venus, is on. And what an amazing discovery it will be, small in size but grand none-the-less.
Think of the headlines: ALIEN LIFE DISCOVERED!
To say it would be sensational is an understatement.
But what happens next? After this game-changing shift in what we know and believe, our lives will change. How they will change depends on what we find.
Our solar system formed over 4.5 billion years ago from a single, swirling cloud of gas and dust. As this cloud coalesced around the sun, whole planets formed in its spiraling grasp. Transformed, shattered, and sometimes obliterated, the planets crashed around before settling into their current orbits. It was a dynamic time.
Heavy bombardment by water-containing asteroids and icy comets further changed these emerging worlds. It’s hypothesized they even delivered water to a young Earth. More wild still - there's a chance these celestial ferries were carrying more than water.
Some may have even contained the building blocks of life.
In this "comet origin" theory, a primordial life-form, or its molecular precursors, evolved "out there" first. These cosmic seeds then rained down on Earth and other planets and moons. If so, life could have taken hold in several places, not just Earth. Each instance evolving independently but sharing a common origin with life here.
If we do find life on Mars, for example, the first thing we'll look at is its genetic structure. We want to see if it is related to Earth life. And if it's DNA-based, then it might very well be.
Scientists are not sure if the building blocks of life "default" to DNA, or it just happened that way once. We've yet to replicate the process in a lab, which suggests it's not an easy thing to have happen. Many experts believe finding DNA-based life elsewhere would likely signal a common origin. If only because the process appears to be exceedingly rare.
But it doesn’t have to be. The same thing could have happened in other star systems too. If the building blocks of life are inherant in star dust, then the same process could have happened anywhere…or even everywhere.
If we do discover life elsewhere, there’s a possibility that it will be entirely different - life that's not DNA-based. In this hypothesis, life doesn't have to be like our own nor even be dependent upon water. Methane-based forms or ones foregoing carbon altogether are possible. And even more fanciful ones have been proposed. Examples include plasma-based life and even “life” inhabiting a stars' corona. Both of these would be so foreign to us that we might not recognize them as living.
Regardless of chemistry, discovering organisms beyond Earth would support that life is more common than we once thought. While finding DNA-based life would be amazing, so too would discovering an alternate form. The latter perhaps even more exciting.
Imagine - having two fundamentally different, unrelated “kinds” of life right here in our solar system. That would vastly raise the chance that life could be anywhere and everywhere in the universe.
Life might just happen.
It's a tantalizing thought. But for now, it remains the stuff of science fiction.
Discovering life in our solar system would be colossal, regardless of its origin. But what kind of life we find, if we ever do find it, will determine how we see and continue exploring the universe. Is it like us? Or is it entirely foreign? To answer this, we must first find it.
Then the real questioning can begin.
Until next time. Science. Fiction. Create.
JRC
Somewhere, something is waiting to be known! :)
It’s there (life) keep looking, I hope that we know what we have located.