Are Aliens Among Us?
In pursuit of evidence that life arose on Earth more than once, scientists are searching for microbes that are radically different from all known organisms
Are Aliens Among Us?
- Artist conception - ARSENIC LIFE-FORM Researchers have hypothesized that in alien organisms arsenic could successfully fill the biochemical role that phosphorus plays for known life-forms. Arsenic is poisonous to us because it mimics phosphorus so well; similarly, phosphorus would be poisonous to an arsenic-based organism... Artist: Jean-Francois Podevin
- Artist conception - ALIENS WITHIN US Perhaps the most intriguing possibility of all is that alien life-forms inhabit our own bodies. While observing mammalian cells with an electron microscope in 1988, Olavi Kajander and his colleagues at the University of Kuopio in Finland observed ultrasmall particles inside many of the cells... Artist: ADAM QUESTELL
- Artist conception - AMINO ACIDS LIFE-FORM All familiar organisms use, with rare exceptions, the same 20 amino acids to construct proteins, but chemists can synthesize many others. Alien microbes could incorporate unusual amino acids such as isovaline and pseudoleucine, which have been found in meteorites... Artist: Jean-Francois Podevin
- Artist conception - TINY ALIENS The smallest bacteria have a diameter of about 200 nanometers. Autonomous organisms on our tree of life cannot be much smaller because they must contain protein-building cellular structures called ribosomes, which are each about 20 to 30 nanometers across... Artist: Jean-Francois Podevin
- Artist conception - SILICON LIFE-FORM Scientists and science-fiction writers have long speculated about what a silicon-based life-form would look like. In an article for the Saturday Review, H. G. Wells wrote: One is startled towards fantastic imaginings by such a suggestion: visions of silicon-aluminium organisms...wandering through an atmosphere of gaseous sulphur, let us say, by the shores of a sea of liquid iron some thousand degrees or so above the temperature of a blast furnace... Artist: Jean-Francois Podevin
- Artist conception - SILICON LIFE-FORM The most radically different aliens would be those based on silicon instead of carbon. Because silicon, like carbon, has a valence number of four (that is, the atom’s outermost orbital contains four electrons), silicon atoms can be arranged in rings and long chains that could form the backbones of biological molecules... Artist: Jean-Francois Podevin
- COVER OF SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, DEC. 07 If, as many scientists believe, life can readily emerge under the right environmental conditions, it is possible that life arose on Earth more than once. Researchers are now seeking evidence of a second genesis by searching for exotic microbes that are biochemically different from all known organisms...
