Official News page 8

REAL LIFE NEWS: ALIENS AMONG US

by Hazed

They walk among us. Or crawl, or swim, or slither. Aliens are around us. At least, they could be!

A major science conference has heard from a physicist at Arizona State University that all kinds of strange life that is unrelated to the life as we know it may be found on Earth. It may be hidden in toxic arsenic lakes, or deep in the sea around hydrothermal vents. It could even be living among us in forms that we don't yet recognize, he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Chicago.

Professor Paul Davies has called on scientists to launch a "mission to Earth" by trawling hostile environments for signs of biological activity that could indicate life. "We don't have to go to other planets to find weird life," he said. "It could be right in front of our noses - or even in our noses. It is entirely reasonable to expect we will find a shadow biosphere here on Earth. But nobody has actually taken the trouble to look.

"The question is why? The cost is not expensive - it would be a fraction of the money we spend searching for extraterrestrial life."

He's got a good point. We already know that there are strange lifeforms that can survive deep in the ocean, around the vents known as black smokers. They live on the heat that belches out from the core of the Earth. Every time anyone looks they find more weird creatures down there.

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