Where are we most likely to find truly alien life? The obvious (though difficult) place to look is on another planet or moon, whether that’s under the icy crust of Europa, near the poles of Mars, or, perhaps, on one of the planets we’re starting to discover orbiting distant stars. Alternatively, we might be able to make alien life for ourselves, through the emerging discipline of bottom-up synthetic biology. But what if alien life is to be found right under our noses, right here on earth, forming a kind of shadow biosphere? This provocative and fascinating hypothesis has been suggested by philosopher Carol Cleland and biologist Shelley Copley, both from the University of Colorado, Boulder, in their article “The possibility of alternative microbial life on Earth” (PDF, International Journal of Astrobiology 4, pp. 165-173, 2005).
The obvious objection to this suggestion is that if such alien life existed, we’d have noticed it by now. But, if it did exist, how would we know? We’d be hard pressed to find it simply by looking under a microscope – alien microbial life, if its basic units were structured on the micro- or nano- scale, would be impossible to distinguish just by appearance from the many forms of normal microbial life, or for that matter from all sorts of structures formed by inorganic processes. One of the surprises of modern biology is the huge number of new kinds of microbes that are discovered when, instead on relying on culturing microbes to identify them, one directly amplifies and sequences their nucleic acids. But suppose there exists a class of life-forms whose biochemistry fundamentally differs from the system based on nucleic acids and proteins that all “normal” life depends on – life-forms whose genetic information is coded in a fundamentally different way. There’s a strong assumption that early in the ancestry of our current form of biology, before the evolution of the current DNA based genetic code, a simpler form of life must have existed. So if descendants of this earlier form of life still exist on the earth, or if life on earth emerged more than once and some of the alternative versions still exist, detection methods that assume that life must involve nucleic acids will not help us at all. Just as, until the development of the polymerase chain reaction as a tool for detecting unculturable microbes, we have been able to detect only a tiny fraction of the microbes that surround us, it’s all too plausible that if alien life did exist around us we would not currently be able to detect it.
To find such alien life would be the scientific discovery of the century. We’d like to be able to make general statements about life in general – how it is to be defined, what are the general laws, not of biology but of all possible biologies, and, perhaps, how can one design and build new types of life. But we find it difficult to do this at the moment, as we only know about one type of life and it’s hard to generalise from a single example. Even if it didn’t succeed, the effort of seriously looking for alien life on earth would be hugely rewarding in forcing us to broaden our notions of the various, very different, manifestations that life might take.