Alien Life Will Be Made By Humans

A lot of money and resources are spent researching other sources of life, maybe not enough resources, but more than you think. There's a whole field of science dedicated to the study of exoplanets (planets not within our solar system), and whether or not there could be life on any of them.

Statistically speaking, the fact that we exist means the odds are not zero. It's just a matter of finding the ratio. For example, is it one planet that has life against 100,000 planets? Is it less than that, or more? We don't know the ratio, but there certainly is one because we are one.

While the study of exoplanets is fascinating and leaves the door open for trillions of possibilities, the odds of life being in our own backyard have not been cancelled out. It could still be here, or at least, the ingredients to make it could be. And for some labs and nations in the world, that could be enough.

Hence, the unsettling title.

In 2024, NASA launched the Europa Clipper, which will fly to Jupiter's moon, Europa, and take measurements. It is a water-world with a salty ocean, possibly as deep as 100 miles (161km). Which is insane. For reference, Earth's ocean is like 7 miles (11km) at its deepest. Meaning Europa could have twice as much water as Earth.

The takeaway here is that there are a few water worlds in the solar system. And many of them are still in the running for possibly supporting life.

While the Europa Clipper is not specifically designed to say “hey, that's a life-form!" it is designed to identify ingredients for habitability. Sounds like a missed opportunity, but imagine a controller for a video game: you can press this button to jump and that button to run, but there is no button for, “perform brain surgery with a toothpick on a moving train."

Identifying life is difficult, and we need to establish a baseline first.

Between Europa, Enceladus, Titan, Venus, Ariel, and a few other celestial bodies, things aren't looking too bad. And while I think finding even a basic life-form is inevitable, what we do in the meantime is shrouded in ambient dread.

We talk about the basic ingredients of life like carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur, knowing full well that it takes more than that to actually create life. You need the right chemical reactions, and that's where humans come in.

My prediction is that one day we find these ingredients, but no life-forms. For whatever reason we cannot surmise, there just isn't life on said celestial body. Maybe there's an ingredient missing, or there was just no spark. It's like having all of the ingredients to make a cake, but they just weren't put together.

Whatever the reason it never began, the temperature on said celestial body is fine, the radiation is minimal, and it's an otherwise totally survivable environment.

So, we do it ourselves.

We send a probe to collect the samples, bring them back to Earth, and in a hermetically-sealed lab, we use those ingredients to spark life. Then we ship it back to said celestial body, and the samples take on a life of their own. Literally. We create alien life.

Whatever happens to us after that won't matter. The remnants of our experiments could live on for millions of years. It makes me wonder if that's how life on Earth began - as an experiment that was left forgotten?

These actions seem entirely plausible and on-brand for humanity. And yet there's something comforting about the idea that all life in the universe began in one spot, somewhere we've never been and may never know about, and life can't help but spread throughout the universe in its own way.