ABOUT FACTS NET Science

Did you ever see those pictures of dust mites? Thank god that they are microscopic or at least very small. Could you imagine trying to coexist with those horrible things if they were even the size of a medium dog? I remember when I was a kid and someone had a microscope. They called me over to look at a drop of water that they had put on a slide. I tell you, you wouldn't have wanted to drink water after looking at that. As we all know, before water was treated the way it is today, there were a lot more organisms in it. These things just swim around doing their natural things like eating other organisms and eliminating waste. Life has pretty much the same principles, no matter what its size is. There are those exceptions to this rule, but the usual steps are: be born, grow or age, die and in between eat and get rid of waste.Of course there is also procreation.

Some organisms give off gas. It is a sort of signature that they are there. As a matter of fact, there are scientists that believe that there may be some sort of life on Mars because they say that they have detected a gassy signature that could mean there is something alive in some caves there. Could it be life that would be equivalent to us? Maybe the remains of some old civilization that is near extermination? I doubt it. It could just turn out to be something that is leaking from the ground or bacterial life. Funny thing, we say that we worry about contaminating the earth and that is why we had put the moon astronauts in quarantine before letting them back into the general population, but we could contaminate another planet with something from Earth. It is true that we do some sterilization before sending probes to Mars, but many think that this is not complete enough. There are the exhaust fumes from the engines of the probes that pump out fumes into the atmosphere and we really don't know what the long term effects of these will be. As if that wasn't bad enough, we are now talking about using nuclear propulsion. Talk about pollution, can you see a reactor crashing on an alien planet? We could create a far worse disaster than 3 Mile Island.

Since we know that life exists in drops of water, could it exist in clouds on planets? Lets take a place that looks totally inhospitable like Jupiter. Jupiter is the biggest planet in our solar system, but it doesn't seem to be anywhere near the biggest planet in the universe. We have discovered several planets, so far, that are much bigger and that are situated in other solar systems. But back to the question, could there be life in the clouds of Jupiter? At one time they were a candidate for life, because it was thought that they contained water vapor, ammonia, methane and other compounds that were thought to resemble Earth's primordial soup. It was felt that all that was lacking was electricity and that lightning strikes would supply that. This speculation came to an end after the Galileo spacecraft studied the clouds and found that they had hardly any organic material in them and that the water content was at least ten times less than was originally thought. Could there be some sort of life that we have no experience with? That is always an open question and is like accusing someone who is mowing their lawn of running over a rock and breaking a window. The mower says he didn't do it and the other person says, could you have done it without knowing it?

When we look for life in other places we tend to look for the type of life that we are familiar with. Put more plainly, we look for more of the same type of life that appears on Earth. But even on Earth we are finding types of life that a few years ago we would have never believed existed. Just look at the microscopic animals that live in the waters around the hot vents in the ocean. They should be boiled alive, yet they are quite happy to swim and play there and live out their lives. What if we find animals or intelligent creatures that live in places that are boiling hot. There might be life forms that would die of the cold on Earth, even in places we consider to be hot. Can you imagine dying of cold in a tropical jungle? It could happen.

It is amazing when you think about it. We spend our entire lives with all sorts of creatures living around and inside of us. If we could see all of them, we would be quite disturbed. Maybe that is why we were given something like 20/20 vision. If we had microscopic vision we would probably be nauseated at what we saw. Some of this life is quite beneficial to us and we might not be able to live without it. Other forms of this life are quite harmful. When the aliens were killed in the War Of The Worlds by the common bacteria in the air, it might not have been so far off from what could happen. It could happen to humans on a foreign planet and it could happen to aliens on this planet, it just depends on what the bodies are used to.