Life in Outer Space?

Aah, Hollywood! The place where dreams come true. All of your imagination can come alive into a great movie, but how real is it all? Take extraterrestrial life for example, little martians coming to earth in there flying saucers, zapping the heads off of the humans and taking over the planet. Or the other way around, people heading for the universe on a journey to another planet because earth has become uninhabitable. It might not happen to us yet, but will it happen to our grandchildren?

First of all, I am a believer of extraterrestrial life or other planets in the universe that can be inhabitable, but I do not believe the mumbojumbo that Hollywood serves us on a silver dish. The treat that humanity is making this planet uninhabitable for us is becoming more than real. Air, water, food getting polluted by our own methods, extinction and endangerment of species by our own monoculture production of goods or animal habitat takeovers. All of this makes it vital for us to have a vision of escaping this escalating mess.

Second, I for one think – next to this escaping vision – that we need to take more care about our planet. For the moment we only have one planet/home and if we mess it up we are sure to be doomed. But the way humanity is living it is not a question of “if”, but “when” the earth will be ruined. Nevertheless, we need to stretch the time we still have on this planet. Organising big environmental summit get-togethers and thereby polluting the sky allot more is in my opinion not the way to go.

To get closer to the answer of life in space, we have to look past what movies feed us. Maybe we even need to look on our own earth instead of looking up. Stepping our of the box or out of the thinking pattern maybe the way to find new life. Felisa Wolfe-Simon of the NASA Astrobiology Institute and U.S. Geological Survey has shown us that life is possible in habitats where we thought there was never any possibility of life. Puddles filled with arsenic acid thrived with life, more specifically a microbe strain of Halomonadaceae.

This can prove that life in outer space environmentslies far beyond our initial comprehension. But it doesn’t help us much in our earth escaping quest.