Aliens and Area 51

Extraterrestrial life is life beyond that which belongs to the Earth. The question of whether life exists outside the earth has puzzled many scientists for years.

What is required for life? On Earth it is CHNOPS (Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Phosphorus and Sulphur). These are the most common and important elements to make biological molecules on this planet. Phosphorus is also used to make cell membranes and sulphur is used to make amino acids. In the baking process, Nitrogen, Hydrogen and Oxygen make carbohydrates and sugars, DNA, RNA and cellulose for plants, methane, proteins and phosphates for genetic material and energy transfer. There's one ingredient missing though, and that's water. It acts as a solvent to chemically bond the ingredients together and provide oxygen to the organism.

Earth is rich in H20 (water) naturally, and back in the day (like really back in the day) meteorites brought CHNOPS in through the atmosphere.

I say meteorites because we must be specific. Asteroids have, of course, never hit earth. Let me explain why:

An asteroid is a small body of rock, carbon and metal orbiting the sun

A comet is a small body of dirt and ice that lets off a trail when getting close to the sun.

A meteroid is part of an asteroid or comet

A meteor is one that hits the earth's atmosphere and disintegrates on entry.

A meteorite is one that makes it all the way through and hits the surface of the Earth.

The reason why water+CHNOPS should make life elsewhere is because the Earth and many other planets are made of space gas, "stardust" (from supernovae stars) and "space dust" (bits of planets and non-supernovae stars) all twirled together through nebulae like a giant cosmic Nigella Lawson. So if we start with the same basic ingredients in our recipe, shouldn't we end up with the same product?

There could also be silicon life. But silicon is not as good a base as carbon. Silicon is similar to carbon but bigger and creates more monotonous shapes than the flexible and malleable carbon. It's also less reactive in forming bonds with other elements.

If there is silicon life though, if it breathed in oxygen it would breathe out sand due to the chemical processes of silicon based life. The hope for silicon-based life remains, however as if it was in an atmosphere rich in sulphuric acid, then the chains of molecules would actually be more stable than carbon-and-water chains on Earth.

Also, if this silicon life-form lived in temperatures around 1,000ºC (or 1,800ºF) the silicon sand it breathed out would be a liquid secretion. Sci-Fi writers take note: I want royalties for a liquid-sand-squirting super-hot, sulphuric-acid monster.

Where are we going to find this silicon-based life, though? Well, here on Earth. One of the earliest lifeforms were living clay minerals, they were based on silicon. Also diatoms - a type of algae - have a silicon-based skeletal structure.

So if silicon is more boring than carbon, what about in the other direction? A planet rich in Boron could produce life with even a great complexity of life. However, at least in these parts of the universe, boron is quite rare.

Metal oxides of titanium, aluminium, magnesium and iron could potentially make life forms at extremely high temperatures, and would create an awesome race of creatures I'd like to term, "rust life."

There could also be plasma life. A plasma is where gas is super-heated and dissolves its bonds due to electrons floating around. It then becomes very reactive in magnetic fields. A simple example of a plasma is neon light.

Plasma, as generated on earth in laboratories or in the middle of electrical storms and grow, multiply by itself and even communicate on a basic level with other plasma balls - several phenomena we deem to be part of life as we know it.

This would be good news for the soul of G Buren. He was a scientist who lost a bet when everyone told him nothing could live on the sun. He was even taken to court for the money and his widow was pursued after his death to pay up on this wager .

The believe in extraterrestrial life dates back to antiquity. In Hinduism there's six planes of existence - Deva, Asura, Manussa, Tiryagyoni (these last two are the only ones on Earth), Preta and Naraka.

In Norse Mythology there's nine: Manheimr (land of the humans), Vanir and Asaheimr (land of the Gods), Jotunheimr (land of the giants), Alfheimr (land of the elves), Hel (land of the dead), Suartalfaheimr (land of the dark elves), Niflheimr (land of ice) and Muspeltheimr (land of fire).

The Jewish Talmud says that at the time it was written there were 18,000 other worlds than this one.

In Islam, in the Qur'an, it states God is the Lord of All Worlds (plural), it also makes reference to a Jinn (or genie) who lives in the heavens above Earth.

Christianity denies aliens officially and got really annoyed when in the 16th Century Giordano Bruno came up with the idea that the universe was infinite, the sun just one star and all stars had their own planets and life systems. He was burned at the stake.

In the 1850s, they saw Mars for the first time and the idea of Martian life hasn't left us to this day. In 1911 there was even a book published called Mars and its Canals: A Guide to Travelling the Canals of Mars - A Scientific Study.

It was, of course, later discovered that these canals weren't filled with water and were just an optical illusion of the sun's light.

Even back in 10th Century Japan they had a folk tale of the Bamboo Cutter who finds a baby the size of his thumb in a stalk of glowing bamboo. The baby's hair shined like the moon. She is beautiful as she grows up into a normal-sized human and rebuffs all attempts at marriage, and cries longing to return to the moon.

Eventually the moon people come, wipe her memory and she goes back home. Leaving the parents that brought her up completely distraught at their loss of a child.

The search for the moon people continues in the modern day: we're looking for single-celled life. We've found gas emissions on Mars, some imprints that could be fossils of nanobacteria on meteorites and methane signatures in Mars' atmosphere - all signs that there could be life on Mars afterall. However, as yet, nothing conclusive.

SETI: The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence has radio telescopes pointed at the sky. The closest they've come is 06EQUJ50 - a signal where each symbol represents the amplitude of the wave received. 0 is very low, up to 9, then A through to Z (the highest). The U halfway through the signal is the highest recording ever made from space, 30 times louder than the background radiation of space. The whole transmission lasted 72 seconds from the direction of Sagittarius and has never been repeated.

Scientists being the type of people they are, named it after the first words spoken when receiving this signal: it's now forever known as "The WOW Signal."

The best place to look for ET is Gliese 581g. A red-dwarf-orbiting planet in the habitable zone of orbit. It's about 2x the size of the Earth.

Area 51 is a big alleged conspiracy that everyone thinks is a government cover-up for finding aliens. Area 51 started out in WW2 as a bombing practice range. In '55 it was used to test the U2 spy planes.

It is part of a large military complex called Groom Lake, also used for atomic bomb tests. Area 51 shares a border with Areas 15, 10, 9, 7, 3, 11 and 5.

Groom Air Base appears to be used for the testing of new and experimental Air Craft. This includes the U2 as previous mentioned and operation OXCART - using the A-12 Mach 3 recon aircraft which became the USAF SR-71 Blackbird.

The US Federal Government only says that it has an operating location near Groom Lake but will say nothing more.

If you go there you'll be followed by private security guards working for the company Wachenhut which became G45 last year.

Lethal force is authorised but so far has never been used. They just radio for the sheriff. $600.00 fines are the norm if they get you and some visitors have even been detained on public land for pointing cameras at the base.

The base isn't on any US maps, satellite pictures or similar. Many UFOlogists have taken their own amateur pictures from surrounding mountains.

The US government declares a taxable value of $2million for the private holdings on the base. No tax assessors are allowed on site to make an assessment, however.

People think that Area 51 has been involved in alien spaceship landings or crashes, development of energy weapons, weather control machines, time travel, teleportation or even as a meeting ground for the Majestic 12 (a secret organisation set up by Harry Truman to investigate UFOs).

Maybe we'll never know.