Scientists said the results, if confirmed, would expand the notion of what life could be and where it could be. “There is basic mystery, when you look at life,” said Dimitar Sasselov, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and director of an institute on the origins of life there, who was not involved in the work. “Nature only uses a restrictive set of molecules and chemical reactions out of many thousands available. This is our first glimmer that maybe there are other options.”

Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a NASA astrobiology fellow at the United States Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., who led the experiment, said, “This is a microbe that has solved the problem of how to live in a different way.”

This story is not about Mono Lake or arsenic, she said, but about “cracking open the door and finding that what we think are fixed constants of life are not.”

– Dennis Overbye, N.Y. Times.

This is an interesting article, if perhaps one ripped from the pages of Norm MacDonald’s Duh! Magazine. It turns out life — this type of bacteria, specifically — is capable of existing in ways we didn’t previously know or consider. Really, the conclusion is that it once again turns out we don’t really know all the things we think we know.

I’ve mentioned before — and I think Carl Sagan has too — that I don’t understand why it always seems like we’re searching for “life as we know it” elsewhere in the universe (or multiverse, I suppose). It strikes me as far more likely that there exists life as we don’t know it, composed of some other series of elements or, who knows, composed of something we cannot even conceive due to the current limits of human understanding.

And here’s what I’m wondering: If and when humans do discover life — whether it’s the type of life we currently recognize or something new — what will we do with it? Like say a space probe of some sort uncovers something that appears to be living, what happens then?

Strikes me that the robot or astronaut would likely secure some sort of specimen, then take it back to the space station — or even to Earth, if possible — and run all sorts of tests on it. That’s how you do science, right?

But that’s textbook alien abduction, brother, and that type of thing is frowned upon when it happens in rural Missouri or whatever.

Then again, I suppose our concept of what aliens would do to us if they did get here — in reality or in our delusions — is entirely predicated on reasonable speculation about what we would do in the exact same situation. We assume — or many of us do — that if aliens were to come to Earth, they’d find some humans and beam them up into their spaceships for all sorts of poking and prodding, Fire in the Sky-style.

That’s really just because we have no point of comparison for intelligent life, so we figure all life intelligent enough to travel between planets would behave like we would in the same situation. Basically all our speculation about initial alien interaction involves scientific research, diplomacy, or war.

But it’s probably just as likely that aliens would show up and do something that makes absolutely no sense to us, because hey, if they’re smart enough to get here they’re probably a lot different from us. We can’t even get back to the damn moon.