We’re all jus’ little green men...

By Bryan Zepp Jamieson

1/31/01

If you watch Dubious George stumble and stammer his way through a press conference, and start wondering if our banana republic presidente is perhaps a space alien or something, it may be that you’re closer to the truth than you think.

Of course, you can find plenty of reasons to sneer at George besides saying he’s a space alien. For one thing, if he really is a space alien, then you are, too. So am I, for that matter, along with the monkeys, the rabbits, the weasels, the tortoises, ameba, and even Dennis Rodman.

Today’s Sacramento Bee ran a story under the byline of Mike Toner of the Cox News Service, reporting that NASA had conducted an experiment that apparently provides an answer to one of the most vexing problems in creation theory, namely, how could water- soluble amino acids get together and interact to form the first living cells in a water environment?

The only answer that worked was that the osmotic membrane that surrounds every living cell on earth would have had to develop first, an answer that didn’t seem to make much sense. Why would such membranes form first, and for that matter, HOW? The organic compounds in the amino acids would have to combine to form the membrane, and nobody had ever been able to demonstrate that amino acids ever did such a thing.

But as scientists get a clearer picture of conditions in space, they try to duplicate on a small scale on earth what we see going on up there, and study the results, and see how it fits in with everything ELSE they see going on up there.

When they saw that organic chemistry going on in deep space, they decided to duplicate it here, and see what it did. So they took a bunch of organic chemicals – water, methanol, ammonia, and carbon monoxide, the junk that makes up the "ice" in comets and exists all over the universe – at Ames Research in Mountain View, California, and combined them at a deep-space temperature of two degrees kelvin, minus 271 Celsius, or -441 Fahrenheit. They also bombarded them with ultraviolet rays and X-rays.

Poisonous gasses at near absolute zero being bombarded by high energy rays isn’t a nurturing, life-giving environment. Indeed, there’s no life on earth that would survive unprotected in such an environment for more than a couple of seconds, except maybe Madonna. Nobody had high hopes for anything more than an interesting question on a final exam for organic chemistry majors to groan their way through.

So imagine the surprise those Ames researchers must have felt when they saw the organic chemicals coalesce into protocells!

These tiny entities had the membrane essential to the formation and cohesiveness of all cells. They all had at least some of the amino acids necessary for the formation of life.  It provides a spectacularly solid answer to the question, "How did the first cell form?"

More theoretical is the question, "How did it get here?". Chances are one piggybacked in as part of a comet big enough that some of the icy core survived the plummet through the atmosphere (OK, a honking big comet!) . Chances are good that this happened. Some cells found earth to be a "Cinderella planet", i.e., a habitat with temperature and conditions suitable for the cell to thrive in, and multiplied and evolved, eventually resulting in cauliflower, deer ticks, and Tom Delay. We have to assume it was worth the time and effort.

Of course, just here on earth, "Cinderella" conditions cover an amazing amount of latitude. Life has been found in the Antarctic ice shelf, under the sea ice, in the superhot sands of the Sahara, and living on the edge of volcanic vents on the bottom of the ocean, transpiring sulphur compounds instead of oxygen/carbon dioxide. An entire phylum of life exists on the eyelashes of seals. Life is fantastically adaptable, and has spread to every corner of the earth that we can study. All in just a few short gigayears.

We now know that planets are commonplace. We know of 75 extrasolar planets, all jovian (big gas giants). In a few more years, we’ll be able to spot terrestrial type planets–earth sized or smaller, with solid surfaces and an atmosphere. In the Milky Way alone, with 5 billion stars, it’s likely there are billions of planets.

This chemical process is going on trillions of times a second throughout the galaxy, in billions of locations. CHON (Carbon, Hydogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen) are everywhere, as are x-rays and ultraviolet.

It seems likely that every planet in the universe has been seeded, not just once but millions of times. If the odds of a protocell surviving and reproducing are a million to one, then most planets have life. Nor will it matter if the temperature is a lot colder than earth or a lot hotter–we have life right here that is quite happy in conditions we think of as being "colder" or "hotter" than "earth normal".

Life may well be everywhere. It’s unlikely that earth is the only place in the solar system with life–a Martian meteorite found in Antarctica had tantalizing evidence of micro-fossils. It may live in the damp patches on Mars, in the hot soup of Venus, in the possibly sub-ice oceans of Europa, on the lips of volcanoes on Ganymede. It might be anywhere.

In light of yesterday’s announcement, we should just assume that it exists, and we will eventually find it. Nor is the fact that no little green men in UFOs have appeared proof of anything: it may simply mean that no planet with the means to drop in for a casual visit exists within 125 light years (that being the amount of time since we began broadcasting and thus announced our presence to the universe), and none may be in a position to reply in a way we can understand within 68 light years.

Life is "up there". Bank on it.

So if you are sneering at Bush, remember: you, too, may be a space alien. But don’t feel bad, because there’s still one thing that separates you from Bush.

Some of us evolved. Some didn’t.