Space voyagers searching for intelligent life finds a race that has been trying to make contact for one hundred of its years – however, this species is so unlike anything these voyagers have ever contacted that they refuse to believe it’s even intelligent. When one of the voyagers convinces the other that the species is, in fact, intelligent, they mutually decide that the best course of action to take is none. They would rather ignore and obfuscate the existence of such a species than deign to make contact with such a grotesque species. After all, who wants to talk to meat?
The creatures in Terry Bisson’s “They’re Made Out of Meat” refuse to make contact with humanity because the idea of a species of intelligent meat is too bizarre for them to stomach – something they’ve never encountered before. And yet, because life on Earth is all we have to go off of, here we are. Looking for more intelligent meat.
A tardigrade, a famous extremophile.
As NASA astrobiologist Tori Hoehler says in “Is Anybody Out There?” (from our assignment Homework #14; published in Discover), “I want there to be life elsewhere, and I want it to be weirdly different from us. With that said, the more you look into the details, the more our kind of life, broadly categorized, seems to do a lot of things that would be difficult to do in other ways. But what’s significant is that there is virtually nothing that you would look for or detect that is specific to one kind of life… instead, you look for what life is doing” (49). That might explain why Bisson’s space travelers were able to find us strange meat creatures even though we are so different from their orfolei or weddilei species – we might not be like any life they’ve ever seen, but we’re still giving off detectable signs of life. In our own astrobiology surveys, keeping an open mind for what might be found may help if we encounter something unlike anything we have on Earth.
And while we turn to life on Earth to imagine where and how creatures might live in different environments (newly-discovered extremophiles are constantly turning up on Earth in increasingly unexpected places), some suggest that we might have aliens right here on Earth with us. Not little green men and not newcomers sewn through recent panspermia but organisms that evolved right here on Earth alongside our lineage – just with a different origin. As far as we know, all life on Earth evolved from a common ancestor. However, some scientists hypothesize that a “shadow biosphere” of microbes with different ancestry – and thus radically different biochemical processes – might have emerged on Earth.
In our strand of life, key amino acids are always “left-handed” (think chirality) while sugars are “right-handed.” Chemical mixtures that are not alive tend to contain equal amounts of left- and right-handed molecules. If life emerged on Earth multiple times, maybe there are some microbes with different ancestry that evolved to utilize right-handed amino acids and left-handed sugars. These “mirror microbes” could be living right alongside us – NASA is conducting experiments on Earth in an attempt to discover them. If life arose on Earth more than once, then we can be a little more certain that life may have arose in other worlds as well – even if it’s nothing like us. As Bisson’s space travelers observe, “Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the Universe would be if one were all alone ..”
Currently studying Computer Science at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. Representing Commodores as a part of Vanderbilt Women’s Bowling Team.
