Psychedelic Apes: From Parallel Universes to Atomic Dinosaurs – the Weirdest Theories of Science and History by Alex Boese

Author:Alex Boese [Boese, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science, history, Experiments & Projects, Earth Sciences, General, Life Sciences
ISBN: 9781509860500
Google: V72FDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2019-07-25T23:47:53.572813+00:00

What if alien life exists on Earth?

You’re very similar to a slime mould. You also have many of the characteristics of a slug, an earthworm, an intestinal parasite and pond algae. But don’t take this personally. It’s not your appearance; it’s your cellular biochemistry, and you share this in common with all known life on Earth.

Evolution has fashioned life into a bewildering diversity of forms, ranging from infectious bacteria all the way up to oak trees and elephants, but these forms are somewhat superficial. Deep down, on the cellular level, all species are more alike than different. The cells of all living things ‘speak’ the same language, which is the genetic code hidden in DNA, and they all store energy in the same way, using ATP molecules. This uniformity suggests that all life on Earth must have come from the same source material – that life must have started just once, and the many varieties of species now populating the globe all trace back to that single origin event.

This is the consensus view of modern science, but in the early twenty-first century a small group of scientists led by physicist Paul Davies and philosopher/astrobiologist Carol Cleland challenged this orthodoxy. They didn’t dispute that all known organisms are part of the same tree of life, but they made the case that there might be unknown organisms lurking around that may belong to separate, alternative trees of life. In other words, life may have started more than once on Earth, and the descendants of those other origins might still be among us.

The ‘biosphere’ denotes the global ecosystem of all living beings, and, in the words of Cleland, the members of those other trees of life would constitute a ‘shadow biosphere’ sharing our planet. Proponents of the hypothesis often refer to these beings, by extension, as ‘shadow life’, although sometimes they use other terms such as ‘novel’, ‘non-standard’, ‘strange’, or ‘alien life’ (alien because, while these alternative life forms may be native to the Earth, they would be profoundly foreign, from our point of view).

These names may make it sound as if the shadow biosphere is somehow paranormal – a phantom zone bordering our own reality. That’s not the intention. Shadow life, if it exists, would be entirely physical and real. It would simply possess a biochemistry fundamentally different from our own. What it would look like, however, is unclear. Externally, it might appear to be just like standard, known forms of life, even while its inner workings would be utterly strange. Or perhaps it would be completely unlike anything biologists have seen before. We might struggle to even recognize it as being alive.

Most scientists aren’t opposed, in principle, to the suggestion that life on Earth may have started more than once. After all, if life began by means of some natural process, which it presumably did, then this process could certainly have happened multiple times, perhaps in different geographical locations. That’s a reasonable assumption.

But, despite this willingness to entertain the general notion

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