In a recent interview with The Observer, the first British astronaut Helen Sharman said that she not only believes in the existence of aliens, but also believes that they can live unnoticed among us here on Earth.
And now an astrobiologist has explained in detail in what form these invisible aliens can exist and how they could get to us.
Shadow biosphere
Samantha Rolf, the chief technical officer of the British Observatory at Bayfordbury, recently published an article in The Conversation on the comments of astronaut Helen Sharman about aliens.
If Sharman is right and invisible aliens already live among us, then, according to Rolf, they most likely live in the microcosm of the “shadow biosphere”.
“By this I mean not the kingdom of ghosts, but unknown creatures, probably with a different biochemistry,” she wrote. "This means that we cannot study or even discover them because they are beyond our understanding."
Carbon is not one
Rolf suggests that silicon may be at the heart of the biochemistry of invisible aliens, in contrast to the well-known carbon biochemistry.
Several research groups are already investigating such alternative biochemical processes, Rolf said. In particular, one of the groups working at the California Institute of Technology has managed to bind living cells to silicon - and if we can breathe life into silicon on Earth, then this would mean that there is a chance that silicon-based life forms could evolve naturally. way somewhere else in the universe and get to us along with meteorites.
"We have evidence that life-forming carbon-based molecules arrived on Earth with meteorites," she writes, "so this evidence certainly does not rule out the same possibility for other, unfamiliar life forms."
