Into the Tiny-Verse
What might we find in the universe? How about some alien microbes.
I believe we might find alien organisms on another planet, possibly even in our lifetimes.
Now that’s a big bold, optimistic statement. The probabilities aren’t great, though they might be better than finding intelligent life according to Drake equation, which tries to factor in whether an intelligent society develops the technology to send a signal, how long that civilization survives, and whether it overlaps with us being able to receive a signal.
But microbes, tiny single-celled organisms that likely dropped off of a meteorite and said, “This is a nice fixer-upper,” and proceeded to grow and eat each other and then change our atmosphere so it had oxygen. Bam—3.5 billion years later, and we get us.
3.5 Billion. Years.
That’s how long microbes have been on Earth. That’s an unfathomably longer time for life to hang out than the measly time that humans have been around. So if we’re going to find life or evidence of life on Mars or Europa, or in the atmosphere of an alphanumeric exoplanet, my money’s on microbes.
Biology is not my strong suit, so anything I say about what those alien microbes look like is going to be 90% BS. But let’s take a moment to consider the slime mold.
Lairich Rig / Stalked slime mould fruiting bodies / CC BY-SA 2.0
Slime molds are single-celled amoeba that break everything we think we know about intelligence.
One species in particular, the SpongeBob SquarePants–yellow Physarum polycephalum, can solve mazes, mimic the layout of man-made transportation networks and choose the healthiest food from a diverse menu—and all this without a brain or nervous system.
Jabr, F. How brainless slime molds redefine intelligence. Nature (2012).
Now that’s the kind of alien life I’m talking about.
We show up on PLS-541 and this string of goo oozes down from a rock to greet us. We don’t notice and we tramp around not understanding why all this goo keeps eating our food, and when someone tries to scrape it or keep it out, it starts pulsing, and the anthropologists go a little nuts. Ten years later they figure it out it was cursing us out for not watching where we were stepping.
There’s a dark interpretation and a horror interpretation of this story, but the world’s dark enough, so let’s stick with the optimistic meeting of curious minds in this first contact space opera.
We meet something strange and weird and completely different from us. That’s what I hope we find when we find alien microbes.
But even that aside, simply the fact of single-celled life that we can recognize on another planet. That would be mind-blowing on its own.
