We Are THIS Close to Finding Aliens

According to Discover mag, “the pace of progress is staggering” at which we are almost but not quite finding alien life.  We’ve found 340 planets outside our solar system, some of them similar in size and composition to Earth.  We’ve found – recently – geysers of water on Saturn’s moon Enceladus.  We’ve found Earth creatures that require no sunlight or water to survive.  We’ve also found that our sun may peter out, to the point that it couldn’t sustain life, in only a billion years.  We’re on the clock here.  We need to find aliens, study them, and take their planet away from them before ours is cashed. 

Once the universe is full of heavy elements, the tables turn and the mortal nature of stars becomes a limitation. The sun, a medium-size star, is about halfway into its total lifetime of 10 billion years. In another 5 billion years it will swell into a red giant and either consume our planet or bake its surface to concrete. Even sooner, in as little as a billion years, the sun’s gradually increasing luminosity may make Earth unbearable for life.

We need to get on this.  But what will our new alien minions or possibly overlords look like?  Crazy underground freak animals give us some indication:

These newly revealed life-forms, called extremophiles [extreeeeeeemophiles!], thrive in conditions so harsh a biologist 50 years ago would not have dreamed it possible. Giant tube worms, crabs, and shrimp live in the dark, a mile below the ocean surface, huddled around superheated geothermal vents. These vents are known as black smokers for the plumes of dark hydrogen sulfide they belch into the ocean. The organisms around them survive off chemicals from the vents in an ecosystem that operates without photosynthesis.

To McKay, these creatures are not the most exciting types of extremophiles, how­ever. “They still rely on oxygen that is indirectly created by sunlight,” he says. Far more compelling are the bacteria that have been found thriving deep underground. One type lives five miles deep in the bowels of South African gold mines. “These creatures get their energy from sources we never imagined,” McKay exclaims. “The South African extremophile bacteria are powered by the radioactive decay of unstable atoms in the rocks. Sunlight and surface water play no role. It’s amazing!”

That may be, but it’s not aliens, first of all, and second of all, when we’ve strip-mined and carbon-emission-blasted our earth into junk status, we’re not going to want to move into some underwater volcano.  What if there were life in another universe though?

Within 10^-30 second after the moment of creation, this speck underwent a period of hyper-rapid expansion—hence “inflation”—becoming everything we see today. As bizarre as this model sounds, it has some reasonable observational support. Some cosmologists go further and argue that inflation could also happen in other places and at other times, when these other bits of creation break out, undergo their own inflation, and become separate pocket universes. Physicists call this multiplication of reality “eternal inflation.” It leads to an almost limitless number of separate universes, each with its own laws of physics.

Which is nuts, obviously.

Source: Discover.  Worth the whole read-through.