The majority of alien-focused sci fi I’ve read or watched has focused on humans being by far the least advanced. The idea of a highly advanced race threatening humans and our home planet is a common theme in books, movies and video games. Even in Mass Effect, you start out being dissed by every major race. But what if it wasn’t like this?
Humans are pretty terrifying to most animals on Earth. We can recover from injuries and illnesses which are fatal to most other species, manipulate almost any material to serve our own purpose and our tool making skills are second to none. Most terrifying though, is that humans are persistence hunters. We can run long distances for a long time and do not stop tracking our prey until it is exhausted and literally cannot fight back. It’s basically like being chased by a T-1000.
My thoughts are that if we find life of any sort anywhere, it will likely be the non-sentient, bacterial kind. We’ve had a look on the moon, we’re currently looking on Mars, but it’s now looking like it will be a lot easier than previously expected to find… on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. Scientists at a number of different facilities are interpreting magnometer readings from the Galileo spacecraft to mean that there is a salty ocean on Europa under the icy surface, and that this global ocean could also contain warm rising ocean currents, allowing for the speculation of life.
This is all based on mathematical models and projections thought, and won’t really be confirmed until circa 2030, when the European Space Agency’s JUICE mission arrives in Jupiter’s vicinity but that’s still in the lifetime of most of us. For those of you who will die before 2030, just assume we found life there, and in time it will be absolutely terrified of us. You can check out the full release over at Science Daily.
