Snottites & Archea - The Search For ET

For someone that dislikes television intensely, I occasionally catch something interesting in a programme, usually BBC's iplayer so that I don't watch television in the way that I used to, mainly as a child.

There was a recent series about the wonders of the solar system, and the episode that has most intrigued me has been entitled aliens.

It looks at the possibilities of life on other planets, and looks at the philosophical implications of the answer, in that if we were to find that we are not alone, or indeed that it is likely that we are entirely alone because of the extraordinary circumstances that have enabled life to evolve to such complicated forms as ourselves.

It has been fascinating to see how an examination of the most extreme environments on this planet seems to have been most helpful in identifying the most likely possibilities within our own solar system.

It seems that life can be found in the most extraordinary locations, and perhaps most interestingly, deep in a glacier frozen for thousands of years, bacteria have been found living in tiny particles of water that have been defrosted by the way in which the bacteria have evolved means of secreting what amounts to antifreeze.

This makes it likely, or is a good indication, that one of Jupiter's moons Europa, might sustain life of some kind.

Although it seems likely that if life exists elsewhere, it will be microbial and more likely to be on a bacterial scale.

It is the extraordinary coincidence of factors that have enabled life on Earth to evolve in complexity over millions of years that seems to be the most important reason for our existence.

Europa is a frozen world, but beneath its surface, it seems to be likely there is liquid water, and on the surface there are observable colored markings which may be evidence of bacterial staining.

The organisms I have mentioned in the title of this posting are real, and the second exists in a most extreme environment where it metabolises sulphur dioxide, and excretes sulphuric acid. With a pH level equivalent to battery acid.

But it seems that we have discovered features on Mars that indicate erosion historically by large quantities of water, as well as discovering gypsum, the chemical composition of which seems likely to have required long periods in which standing water may have existed on that planet.

Gypsum contains calcium, and I can't help but imagine that this must have come from the primitive skeletal systems of small living creatures.

What a fascinating programme, genuinely looking at something with which mankind has been obsessively interested in for much of the 20th century and beyond, perhaps as long as we have been possessed of self-consciousness.