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Some scientists say that our planet is unique and the chances of finding life that looks like ours is very remote. This is not to say that life doesn't exist outside our little realm. There could be many different types of life out there and some may not even be that far away. When you look at the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, what do you see? I see something that resembles our solar system. All these moons are orbiting giant planets like the way the planets orbit the sun. The moons are yet to be explored, but there are some intriguing photographs of some of them that indicate ice and maybe water. We know that organisms on our planet have adopted to the harsh conditions found under ice and near hot thermal vents. Maybe it will turn out that life will exist on one or several of these bodies. While it may not be intelligent human life, it might just be some type of animal life. While we would consider it far fetched, maybe there is intelligent life living in the water on one of these worlds. Just because we developed on the land doesn't necessarily mean that intelligent life on another world would not develop in water.

There are people out there that swear that we have been visited by aliens who look just like us and come from the Pleiades star system. A second type of human type alien is said to come from planets around the star Sirius. Most of us know that just because some say this is true, that no proof has ever reached us to confirm this. SETI, the search for extra terrestrial intelligence has been trying to confirm the existence of aliens for many years. For all we know, they may have already, but understandably their standards have to be high and this means that detecting what seems as an intelligent signal from space, is not enough. They have to turn the telescope away and then try to reacquire the signal again and this is where they failed. There have been a few times, to my understanding, that they thought that they had received signals from an intelligent race and this includes the most famous of all, the WOW signal. The WOW signal was a signal that seemed so perfect that an astronomer wrote the word WOW by it, on the printout. Even this signal was not reacquired after the scope was turned. It could be that we are barking up the wrong tree with this kind of search. First of all, if an intelligent race exists they may be using some unknown form of communication that is much faster than we could ever imagine and if some race is at the point of our development than their signals would not have reached us yet. It is quite a dilemma.

Humans are similar to the animals around them. They seem to be constructed the same way generally. They have genes and chromosomes, are carbon based and made up of cells. What are the chances of all this being the same somewhere else? There are so many stars and galaxies out there that you have to think that somewhere there is a planet with another human race on it, but this may not be true. Of course it depends on how you define the human race. Would you call someone who was slightly different from us human? Say he looked exactly like us except for the fact that he had three nostrils? That would not be a very big difference. If you said yes, would you take it a step further and call someone who have seven fingers and toes a human? Where would you draw the line? I think that this is kind of a hard question to answer. We all know that if we meet a creature that has two legs, two arms a body and a head, but looks like a cross between an ape and a bird we are not going to call him human, no matter how smart he is.

I think that we are going to have to weigh how many different combinations there can be in building a body as compared to the amount of planets that we suspect might exist that are capable of harboring life. When you figure that there are more stars than grains of sand on the beach and this may be a gross miscalculation, there may be far more, it may turn out that there could be just as many cell combinations that would combine to make animals of vastly different looking types. Forget carbon based life, even forget silicone based life which has been talked about but never seen, there may be all sorts of different based life that we can not even conceive of. Wouldn't it be something if life was discovered that was based on an element that we haven't even discovered yet? What about if we found life that was deadly to us. It might be radioactive for example. Just because we are not impervious to radiation doesn't mean that other life wouldn't be. Roaches are very tough and even though they are based on the same material as we are, they are more resistant to radiation than we are, which shows that it isn't the same for everything. Thus other life that might be found could differ from us on what harms them and what doesn't.

I think that we will never find beings that are exactly like us. There are just too many combinations of materials that make us up. This is not to say that they won't get close. I have to think that there will always be at least slight differences. These differences may not always be visible. Their blood could be different for example. Internal organs, if they use them, might not be the same, or if mostly the same might be located in different areas. Hey they might even carry a spare organ that springs into action if the main one is damaged. Who knows, maybe this will even be our fate some day. If science gets advanced enough could they place spare organs in our bodies? It is just a thought. Anyway, I do not think that anyone alive today will ever see a human looking alien and if they did, they wouldn't know it anyway, even if it walked right up to them and declared itself. Let's face it, we just wouldn't buy it.