Millions of people believe in aliens like this prop in the international ufo museum and research center in roswell, new mexico. There is no conclusive evidence of any life beyond earth, but there is hope: if microbes can live in the pores of rock deep beneath the earth or at the rim of a scalding yellowstone spring, then they might find a place like mars not so shabby. Written by joel achenbach republished from the pages of national geographic magazine something astonishing has happened in the universe. There has arisen a thing called life flamboyant, rambunctious, gregarious form of matter, qualitatively different from rocks, gas, and dust, yet made of the same stuff, the same humdrum elements lying around everywhere.

Life has a way of being obvious it literally scampers by, or growls, or curls up on the windowsill and yet it's notoriously difficult to define in absolute terms. And that kind of life has a big question: what else is alive out there? there may be no scientific mystery so tantalizing at the brink of the new millennium and yet so resistant to an answer. With instruments such as the hubble space telescope, scientists have discovered a bewildering amount of cosmic turf, and yet they still know of only a single inhabited world. The late astronomer carl sagan estimated that there are a million technological civilizations in our galaxy alone. John oro, a pioneering comet researcher, calculates that the milky way is sprinkled with a hundred civilizations.

And finally there are skeptics like ben zuckerman, an astronomer at ucla, who thinks we may as well be alone in this galaxy if not in the universe. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as various pundits have wisely noted. But still we don't have any solid knowledge about a single alien microbe, a solitary spore, much less the hubcap from a passing alien starship. Our ideas about extraterrestrial life are what sagan called plausibility arguments, usually shot through with unknowns, hunches, ideologies, and random ought to bes. Even if we convince ourselves that there must be life out there, we confront a second problem, which is that we don't know anything about that life. We don't know if it requires a liquid water medium, if it swims or flies or burrows.

Despite the enveloping nebula of uncertainties, extraterrestrial life has become an increasingly exciting area of scientific inquiry. The field is called exobiology or astrobiology or bioastronomy every few years it seems as though the name has been changed to protect the ignorant. Nasa hopes to build a telescope called the terrestrial planet finder to search for earth like planets, examining them for the atmospheric signatures of a living world.

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In the past decade organisms have been found thriving on our own planet in bizarre, hostile environments. If microbes can live in the pores of rock deep beneath the earth or at the rim of a scalding yellowstone spring, then they might find a place like mars not so shabby. Mars is in the midst of a full scale invasion from earth, from polar landers to global surveyors to rovers looking for fossils. A canister of mars rocks will be rocketed back to earth in the year 2008, parachuting into the utah desert for scrutiny by scientists in a carefully sealed lab. In the coming years probes will also go around and, at some point, into jupiter's moon europa. That icy world shows numerous signs of having a subsurface ocean and could conceivably harbor a dark, cold biosphere. The quest for an alien microbe is supplemented by a continuing effort to find something large, intelligent, and communicative.

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Seti the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has not yielded a confirmed signal from an alien civilization in 40 years of experiments, but the signal processing technology grows more sophisticated each year. The optimists figure it's only a matter of time before we tune in the right channel. There's a fair bit of boosterism surrounding the entire field, but i'd bet the breakthrough is many years, if not decades, away.

The simple truth: extraterrestrial life, by definition, is not conveniently located. Another is that life radiates information about itself that, if nothing else, it usually leaves a residue, an imprint, an echo. If the universe contains an abundance of life, that life is not likely to remain forever in the realm of the unknown. Contact with an alien civilization would be an epochal and culturally challenging event, but exobiologists would settle gladly for the discovery of a tiny fossil, a mere remnant of extraterrestrial biochemistry. That's what we need to begin the long process of putting human existence in its true cosmic context. Exobiologists go to the worst places on earth, or at least the most extreme the driest, coldest, most mars like or europa like environments they can find. If you want to track down the exobiologist jack farmer from arizona state university, you look for him in death valley, on the shores of nearby mono lake, or swimming beneath the ice shelf in antarctica.

If seeking chris mckay, you might check out the atacama desert of chile or some island north of the arctic circle. I tagged along with boston on one of her trips to a wet, bat ridden cave in southern mexico called villa luz. Boston has been studying the microbes that thrive there in environments where a human being not wearing a gas mask would perish. Boston and her friend diana northrup, a librarian and cave biologist in new mexico, are undeterred by the face smashing gas masks they must wear or by the constant wetness, the darkness, the bats, or the slight possibility that a belch of carbon monoxide would kill everyone. Not are they overly concerned about the various threats of malaria and dengue fever and whatever other exotic diseases they might pick up here. Before we entered villa luz, i asked if other was any danger of encountering an unknown, ebola like pathogen. The cave floor was covered with water of varying depths and no transparency, and we walked gingerly so as to avoid discovering unmapped deep water.

By caving standards, though, this was a walk in the park no ropes required, just some crawling and scrambling through low ceilinged passages. Midges flitted, spiders spun webs, bats zagged and zigged just over our heads, emitting their high pitched sonar. Red rock walls were covered with green slime, black muck, gooey white gypsum paste, and limestone in the process of being dissolved by sulfuric acid. Just as i was thinking how much this cave resembled the human nasal cavity, we came to the snottites boston is lobbying to have the word recognized as a scientific term.

Boston and her team have been measuring their growth, trying to understand the metabolism of the microbes and their long term effect on the geology of the cave. Dry weather since her last visit seemed to have inhibited the growth of the structures. Mike spilde, another member of the team, splashed over to where i'd been inspecting a water bug whose shell was covered with eggs. He reached into a spring burbling from under a rock and pulled out some gray wads the consistency ff cooked cabbage. They are vibrant microbial communities, not clinging to life in a narrow niche but proliferating in it, replicating up a storm.

Taking a break back on the surface, boston placed some of her cave work in context. We have discovered she means scientists in general organisms thriving in environments harsh to us but essential to them. It's good for your soul, and good for your intellect, and good for your work to have your imagination stretched, to be open to the possibilities.