We are the aliens

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A new article published in Scientific American raises an interesting possibility. Author Paul Davies suggests what others before him have contemplated: that on the microbial level, alien life might actually be all around us, even inside us. So how can we tell the aliens from the native born?

“How weird do they have to be to suggest a second genesis as opposed to just an obscure branch of the family tree?” he said. Davies suggested that the only way to prove an organism wasn’t “life as we know it” was if it were build using exotic elements which no other form of life had.

This idea may seem heretical to some who would claim that, in terms of life, earth is a closed system. But science has proven, of course, that all of the compounds of life were brought here from somewhere else, so why shouldn’t that migration continue post big bang?

Perhaps earth’s life is really nothing more than a giant colonization project from the planet Mars, which NASA says hosted bacterial organisms. In the bombardment of asteroids, the same kind the formed the moon, it’s more than possible that microbial travelers from Mars, or some other celestial body, hitched a ride to Earth along the way. Those microbes may have provided the crucial building blocks for life to evolve on the planet, and, thus, it could be argued that those aliens we keep searching for in the heavens might actually have been staring at us in the mirror all this time.