Aliens Among Us

Some people complain that aliens are very blandly portrayed in books, movies etc. Half are humanoid, often being mere WASPs from another galaxy. The other half are carnivorous plants, slimy blobs etc. They: few portrayals of extra-terrestrial life are truly original.

Not so on Earth. The Intelligent Designer Himself isn’t just a fan of the fantasy genre (Bible/Koran/Book of Mormon etc) but of sci-fi. Just look at these aliens-on-earth he designed in his Great Whitebeardyness. (Many of these examples come from Stephen Jay Gould, if you’re interested in more curiosities, check out his books.)

A Fish in Drag

Its fins have evolved into leg-like limbs it uses to walk the sea floor (just like the prophecy of a 19th century Englishman who married his cousin). So much for a lack of transitional organisms. Oh, and it has giant lips. With lipstick of a colour that can only be associated with drag. (Hat tip Atheist Jew)

Paragon of Precision

Humans have about 50,000,000,000,000 cells. Of course this isn’t an exact number, it depends on your weight, body composition etc. Some creatures don’t have this sloppy indeterminacy. A trivial example is single-celled life, but that’s just a boring cell count of 1. The roundworm c. elegans is more interesting, each hermaphrodite having exactly 959 cells. Each cell has a very rigid specific function. This worm is literally a life-DIY-toolkit.

Hell’s Minions

Some microorganisms live in very hot temperatures, eg. hot springs. Others even take it further by living underground. Not only do they reside in what was thought of as hell for hundreds of years, they’re alien in another way. All our food comes from the sun, either directly (photosynthesis) or indirectly (animals eating plants that photosynthesised). For a while it’s been thought that all of life relies on photosynthesis. Until such creatures were found. They have no access to sunlight and hence live entirely off other chemical reactions. It’s possible there’s actually more of these than there are plants and animals! So all surface life might be the tip of the iceberg, the rest being happily submerged in a boiling hell.

Incestuous Mites

The acarophenax tribolii has a great life cycle. The female lays 15 eggs: 1 brother and 14 sisters. Before being born, the brother impregnates all 14 sisters and dies. The sisters eat their mother from the inside out. When they’re born their mother’s body is just a skeleton. The inside contains just them and their feces. They emerge from the skeleton, already pregnant with the 15 eggs. And so on.

Which Way’s Down?

Magnetotactic bacteria are a great indication of how differently the world appears on a smaller scale. They’re so small that gravity has no effect on them (just like dust particles fly through the air oblivious to gravity). In their driftings through the ocean they need to rise to the surface at some times and sink at others. But without gravity how do they know which way’s down? Not a trivial question, but one they appear to have brilliantly solved by having little magnets on them. This takes advantage of the fact that the earth’s magnetic field for a N pole of a needle points slightly DOWN in the North hemisphere, and UP in the South.

A True Alien

If you look at the pictures below you’ll think they’re literally from science fiction. This is hallucigenia sparsa from the famous Burgess Shale (one of the oldest collections of animal fossils). The Shale has branches of life that died out hundreds of millions of years ago (before the first flimsy vertebrates), hence many are completely alien to us. This one was first visualised as a creature with giant stick legs and tiny feelers (LHS). Then it was realised it’s the other way up, with large spikes and smaller legs (RHS). Its alienness even stumped the paleontologists who are used to reconstructing aliens.

These examples really bring it home that reality is more exciting and imaginative than all pseudoscience. The weirdest aliens are simply species that have evolved alongside us for the last 3 billion years.