Life On Mars

This alien landed in my garden from the planet Gherkin.

If the earth were an apple, its atmosphere is the skin. Every living thing that we know of, the vast numbers of species that populate this place from fungi to fir trees, from crabs to Chris Evans, has its being within that skin. Every historical event has occurred somewhere in that thin and fragile membrane.  Only a few of us have ever left the skin, and then just skimmed the surface of it in the International Space Station. (Oh yes and apparently a few guys went to the Moon but that was before I was born - and I'm 40 now!)

We have not found any life anywhere else. Nothing on any of the other planets orbiting our Sun. Mars has no little green men, or canals. No cities or any other evidence at all showed up in the latest fly-by photos of Pluto. The jury's still out on a couple of moons of Jupiter and Saturn which have water and internal sources of heat, but if we were to find something there it's unlikely to have more than one cell to rub together.

This being comes from the star system Mole

Of course there are many billions of stars just in our galaxy, lots of them with planets, and the best guess is that there are 15-30 billion “Earths” out there (planets that are the right distance from their star potentially to harbour life.)  As scientists trawl through the data that the Kepler telescope gathered, just from a small patch of sky in the Cygnus constellation every now and then they find another in the “Goldilocks” zone  - ie not too hot, or too cold. Kepler 425b is the latest to hit the headlines. But we don't even know if it's made of rock or gas, let alone if it has water, let alone alien life, let alone intelligent alien life.

But with that many potential exoplanets out there, the chances seem good that life has sprung up elsewhere. Last year NASA made the bold announcement that they expect to find intelligent alien life within the next twenty years.  And last month a new $100m initiative called Breakthrough Listen was announced which over the next ten years will search the million closest stars to Earth, plus the centre of the galaxy, the galactic plane, and the hundred nearest galaxies to boot. If there is some alien civilisation with a radio transmitter beaming out a signal encoding their favourite sitcom, they hope to find it. And if they do, the Earth has no worked-out plan what to do next. The big question would be, of course, do we reply? 

Until then, this apple skin and all that lives beneath it is all we have got. Let's treat it with the utmost care it deserves.

The beautiful Torrent Walk near Dolgellau