Imagine you are a cosmonaut for Mars colonization mission. One day, you and your rover are strolling around the red planet for daily observation. Suddenly you encounter a strange thing. Its shape doesn’t look like normal martian rocks, and it surely doesn’t look like a “normal” living organism either.

So, what is it?
Can you decide whether that thing is an extra-terrestrial living organism or just another martian rock?

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One of human’s quest in this cosmic exploration era is finding our neighbors. Until this day, there is no solid evidence that we have ever encountered any extra-terrestrial living organism. Despite a lot of conspiration theory about Area 51, UFO and other Alien theory, the real – public reports stay big zero.

In Mars colonization mission that I mention earlier, it is very hard to recognize extra-terrestrial living organism when the cosmonaut has ever found one. The cosmonaut is a normal human being just like us. And we, human, tend to see and perceive things using human perspective and knowledge.

There are some characteristics that we use to define living organism. They are Growth, Respiration, Movement, Excretion, and Reproduction. These characteristics are based on our observations towards living organism on planet earth. It’s most likely that extra-terrestrial living organisms are utterly different from organisms live on earth. The structures, the characteristics, the behavior, the senses, everything can be different.

Most earth’s life form are carbon-based. We just cannot say that extra-terrestrial living organism would be carbon-based as well. We should be aware that everything’s possible. They may be iron-based like Optimus Prime and the Autobots. Or they may be sulphur-based and having acid blood just like Xenomorph in Alien franchise.

Mentioning my previous post, a life form can create order from its chaotic surrounding. One thing that make life form a “life form” is having optimum, even low entropy level. But, how low? At which level we can say that it is an optimum entropy level to call it a life form? Earth’s life form may have different entropy level from outer-earth’s life form. We don’t know their mechanism to maintain their entropy level at optimum level. And until now and as far as I know, we still don’t have any sensors to measure entropy level on living organism.

We are in a very weird scenario. We are looking for something we don’t even know what we are looking for

It’s easy when it’s easy

Imagine this:
You stroll around city park on Sunday afternoon. As you walk towards the bench near you, you saw Jabba the Hutt, or Megatron. You can easily say that they are Aliens. They have limbs (I know Jabba doesn’t have legs but he has arms, so it still count), and they have face. They have some similarities with us, but they’re also utterly different from us.

I’d say that it is an “I’ll know it when I see and observe it for some time” phenomenon.

Back on the Mars colonization mission I mention earlier, if I encounter that strange thing, I cannot tell whether it is a Martian Alien or just a Martian strange rock. I just cannot recognize what is that. But, if I can put it on the rover and take it to the base station, I can do some observation to it, maybe running some non-destructive test as well. Later on, after some observations and tests, I can tell whether it is an alien life form or not based on the tests’ results.

For decades, human have launched many space probes to discover other life form outside our planet. Voyager 1 carrying The Golden Record into the outer solar system, hoping that by any chance Voyager 1 encounter extra-terrestrial life form, they can learn something about planet earth. Don’t forget about Mars. Humans are obsessed with this red planet. It is located in the Goldilocks Zone, and some scientist at NASA say that there might be some kind of ancient life form. Opportunity rover is the first rover to land on mars. Then there is Curiosity rover that landed in 2011, and InSight mission is the latest probe that successfully land on Mars. We even built the largest radio telescope in China.

All of these efforts that humans have done, and still zero solid evidence about our living neighbor.

Where is everybody? Do we actually have neighbor?

Footnote: back on another episode of answering my biophysics assignment. This entry is my answer for question numero tres: How can you recognize extra-terrestrial living organism when you find them?