A panel of leading scientists have concluded that our search for life might not be broad enough. They are afraid that we might miss organisms that have no DNA or other earthly molecules. This is quite surprising, coming from the scientific community. I just can't help but feel that maybe, we should try looking for this type of life on Earth first. I know it sounds crazy, but could there be other life here that we are not aware of? Scientists claim that while life on Earth looks very diversified, it is not all that different at the molecular level. If this is so, I guess the thing here is, that if life took a different track on some other world, it might all have followed that track like it did on Earth. The scientists stated, “The committee’s investigation makes clear that life is possible in forms different from those on Earth,”. I wonder how we would even know if we discovered life if it is entirely different from our own? If it didn't move, might we not think that it was a rock or tree, depending on what it looked like?

Extraterrestrial life might not need water, but could exist on some other liquid, or no liquid at all. The old argument about life based on silicon, instead of carbon, has reared its head again. Chemists have been asked to investigate what other forms that life giving chemicals could take. It turns out that besides water, there are many other liquids that might support life. These forms of life might not even be detected by our robots looking for life on other planets. There are macromolecules that use silicon, but we have yet to find how they might support life. We are in a universe where anything is possible. We have no experience with extraterrestrials or with extraterrestrial life on any level. Even if we did and it came from our own solar system, this doesn't mean that it would be the same in other places. There just might be some similarity when found in this system that wouldn't exist in a different solar system. This is the exciting part, we just don't know what to expect yet. Could it be that life in even our galaxy will turn out to have some similarities. Well I guess there is no end to this type of thinking, as far as distance from us goes. I tend to think that maybe our sun will turn out to be responsible for the type of life that exists on Earth and that the same might turn out to be true on other worlds.

The scientists thought about all the different locations in our solar system, with an eye towards which might support life of our type. They knew that many planets and moons seem inhospitable at first glance, but they were interested in knowing if Earth type life could adopt to live in any of these places. After all, life on this planet is very good at adopting to hostile environments. We have organisms that live in scalding hot water and fish, with natural antifreeze in their bodies, that live in very cold environments. Humans have even breathed liquid, in underwater environments, which their diving suits were filled with. In 1920 Winternitz and Smith demonstrated that human lungs can tolerate large amounts of a saline solution without damaging them. In 1950 it was suggested by Stein and Sonnenscheim that you could keep an animal alive, that was was submerged in an oxygenated saline solution. In 1962 Krysla was submerging mice in the above solution and they were showing short term survival. The break through came in 1966 when Clark and Gollan started using perfluorocabons(PFC). They submerged mice and the mice breathed in the liquid. After keeping them in the liquid for some time they returned them to normal breathing and the mice were fine.

Here is what I find funny, just when you think that you know everything, you find out that you really know hardly anything. We thought that we knew that people had to breathe air and couldn't breathe liquid, then we found out that they could breathe certain types of liquid. Now we are discussing the fact that life might exist that is completely foreign to our type of life. Will we find out that life can exist on a different plane or use different time periods or even be completely invisible to us? Our bodies are programmed using DNA, what if an alien body was programmed using chemical markers? Maybe some types of aliens would have to hatch from eggs. Remember we come from eggs. We are formed internally, but they might form in an external egg like a bird or other animal. Could there be extraterrestrials that are born fully grown and regress backwards as they age? There are so many possibilities. I have to think that one thing is for sure, there will be all different lengths of life spans and it just might turn out that we have one of the shorter ones.

One concept that is being discussed, is putting detectors that can detect different types of life on some of the moons, such as Titan, Enceladus and Europa. One of the main reasons for the selection of these moons, is the fact that water in one form or another has been found, or is suspected to exist, on all three of these moons. Many feel that Europa actually has liquid water, since it has such an icy crust. This has made it one of the brightest objects in the solar system. Nothing is guaranteed however, it might be some other type of liquid under the ice, we just can't be sure yet. The search for life has been bumped up to high priority by NASA. One of the problems that science faces, is that it is hard to decide what test results constitute a sign that life is present, if you are not familiar with that type of life.

So you see, it is not easy to develop tests for life that is completely alien to our own on Earth. SETI has been looking for intelligent life for years and officially they state that they have never found it. Unofficially, they may have. The WOW signal, a signal that was picked up and then seen on a printout, had the word wow written in the column next to it by a scientist. The trouble was that it only happened once. The criteria for a signal from an intelligent life source by SETI, is you receive the signal then turn the radio telescope completely away and then turn it back and try and pickup the signal again. This might be fine for a signal that is sent to us on purpose, where the aim is to have it detected by Earth, but what if we just picked up chatter between 2 ships and it stopped? Does this mean that there is no intelligent life out there? Of course not.

Will we ever find life forms that are radically different from our own? Maybe the question should be, will we ever find life forms? In either instance, this would be a great advancement for science. Not only would it make us realize for sure that life exists outside our own world, but we just might be able to adopt some of the functions that these life forms perform and use them to improve our life. In any case, NASA is going to start really getting into the life discovery business and this should be really interesting.