Strange and disturbing

What is such a man capable of doing to get back at a reality that has rejected him?

President Gollum announcing economic initiatives

Update: I kid you not, about 30 seconds after I posted this entry, I received this AP story from a reader:

Scientist: Alien life could already be on Earth

LONDON—Scientists and other experts are gathering in London to consider new ways—and new places—to search for alien beings….

One astrobiologist says the best place to look for aliens may be right here on Earth. Paul Davies of Arizona State University said Tuesday that extraterrestrial life may have found its way to this planet at several different times.

If so, Davies says, the aliens could be “right under our noses—or even in our noses.”

Bizarrely, that’s the end of the story. The AP doesn’t explain what Davies meant.

- end of initial entry -

OI writes:

It’s a variant of the panspermia theory—that primitive (single-celled, probably) life starts on comets or similar objects and drifts through the galaxy on spacedust, happening to fall down on planets from time to time. So a given planet could be colonized by different waves of simple organisms, that may or may not have common ancestry. If there were microorganisms on this planet that weren’t part of the web of interrelatedness connecting all known life forms, they’d probably be very niche creatures—or if they were related (the earth being colonized twice by microorganisms from the same original stock—from a common meteor shower like the Perseids for example) we might not be able to tell the difference, there’s enough variety in the niches such creatures exist in already.

It’s one of those “Hey this is neat to think about” things that probably won’t go anywhere meaningful. Though space-based “life as we know it” isn’t impossible at all. “Water bears”—tardigrades—are arthropods that can survive outer space-like conditions. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that creatures like that could survive a cataclysmic collision, followed by a very long ride on drifting debris, followed by a fall onto another planet.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 26, 2010 10:21 AM | Send