Beware the water sucking aliens!

As I was sitting on my butt watching TV and playing Monopoly on my laptop the other evening... something I do most evenings; I call it "multi-tasking"... a thought drifted into my mind, careened off the walls and got snared in the sticky goo of brain cells. It was something about extra-terrestrials, earth, and whether we might attract said E.T.'s. Of course, some time has passed since then and the idea is not what it once was (which, I believe, was clear, concise, and clever).

Here's how that process went...

The show I was watching was about defining reality and quantum mechanics. There was discussion about reality being something other than what we think it is. The geniuses interviewed couldn't answer the question "What is reality?" and from there we went into atomic structure and how our understanding of the basic building blocks of matter has changed and then quarks and leptons and other weird things, most of which went well over my head.

One of the things I got from this discussion of reality was that theoretical physicists (who, I am told, are involved in understanding it) were surprised to find that there are things smaller than atoms. I wasn't... I think there are even smaller, weirder, things than quarks and such.

As they began to talk about how reality is altered by the act of observing it (I know... heady stuff, right?), I began to think about extra-terrestrials. And whether they might come to earth and why. And that naturally led to water. Because, somewhere, sometime, I read or heard that water might be something which would induce space faring aliens to invade our little planet.

You might recall that some grad students or professors wrote a paper theorizing about space aliens coming to earth to wipe us out for a couple of reasons; that we are a warring and violent and polluting species or because we have some resource that they want or need... such as water. As my mind considered these things and concepts of reality (tossing into the concept of the multiverse where in some reality, aliens may have already invaded), I tried to find something to grab onto before I slipped over the edge.

Something else may have been involved, this article:


Found: A Watery Solar System Being Born — and Clues to Earth's Creation

Scientists looking for life (or at least earthlike life) have always obeyed a simple rule: follow the water. Biology is a wet process, after all — and generally the wetter the better. Now, the Herschel Space Observatory has spotted an infant solar system 175 million light years from Earth that seems fairly awash in primordial water. The finding suggests many more such systems may be out there — and offers tantalizing clues about how our own biologically rich world began as well.

Scientists who study such things theorize our planet has the water it does because comets brought it to us in the early stages of Earth's formation. They are looking at the above discovery as supporting that theory. I am not so sure. I think it suggests that we might be entirely wrong about it. Water may just be common throughout the universe. Which, if true, pretty much shoots down the concept of aliens invading in order to suck the planet dry so they can save their own dusty, desert laden, turf. I mean, why come all the way to our little speck when there are bound to be planets closer to them with the water they need?

At least... in this reality.