Aliens and science don’t usually go together. Maybe it’s the, let’s say, “disheveled” look of the overly eager UFO enthusiasts and abductees. Both professional and amateur astronomers alike are quick to distance themselves from talk of UFOs. But that is a far cry from saying there is no alien life. While there remains no solid proof of extraterrestrial life, more and more discoveries do seem to hint that it exists.
A July paper in the International Journal of Astrobiology claims that liquid water in comets, once thought virtually impossible, is in fact almost a certainty. The authors used the latest discoveries of comets’ interiors to calculate that many comets would give off radioactive heat, causing the frozen ice commonly found in comets to melt into liquid water.
More significantly, the authors argue these potential lakes and oceans, together with the organic materials we already knew existed in comets, would have provided ideal conditions for primitive bacteria to thrive. Bam! Likely extraterrestrial life, right there in a respected journal. And that’s not all.
NASA announced just this week it found the amino acid glycine, one of the essential building blocks of life, in samples of a comet. The Stardust spacecraft, built specifically to help scientists analyze comets and their makeup, brought samples of Comet Wild 2 back to Earth. The Stardust principal investigator himself called the glycine discovery an exciting and profound result, and I have to agree. While it’s still a far cry from proof of extraterrestrial life, it’s one more bit of evidence supporting the idea.
We might be quick to pick apart any notion of potential alien life, and that’s fine — it’s the role of science to doubt and question, after all. But we should also remember that extraterrestrial life remains a distinct possibility, with no evidence against it. Just because scientists and aliens don’t normally mix, doesn’t mean it always will be so.
Do you think aliens are a big joke? Or do you think that if it is just us, it seems like an awful waste of space?
Photo credit: NASA/JPL