Almost-Alien Life is Here…on Earth

The most unique lifeforms on our planet give us a glimpse into what’s possible.

Octopus genes are more advanced than any other order of animals on Earth. One of the groups of genes that they exhibit codes for the development of their amazing distributed nervous system. On top of this, octopods possess regenerative and camouflage capabilities, and are among the smartest animals on the planet.

There are species of bacteria that survive in environments so harsh they would melt the flesh from your bones in seconds. They live in super-alkaline lakes, in the ultra-high pressure of the Mariana trench, alongside nearly deep-fryer temperature hydrothermal vents, and can even survive high doses of gamma radiation.

Tardigrades, A.K.A. “water bears”, can survive in the harsh cold and pure vacuum of space, and can put themselves in a dormant state in which their metabolism reduces to 0.01% of normal, allowing them to live to nearly 30 years in more moderate conditions, essentially extending their expected lifespan of only a few months by 300 times.

These are a few creatures that live with us now, and they are nearly as different from us as much alien life will be.

But, despite how different these subjects are, the fact remains they evolved on Earth, with us. We are all descendants of the very first living cells that appeared sometime between 3.8 and 4.3 billion years ago during the Eoarchean Era.

Since then, life has been branching out in innumerable different directions, constantly testing the boundaries of its environments to see what forms can thrive and what forms are insufficient. Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” has been at play for billions of years.

Scientists estimate that there may be as many as 8.7 million species currently alive on Earth today. We’re only sure of roughly 1.2 million of those, which are catalogued. It’s taken the work of many generations of explorers and biologists to find and record them, but that’s where we are now. The work is never-ending.

There’s a flipside to that number which is utterly horrifying:

This means that we are losing species 3 times faster than we are finding them.

This means that by this time next year, 36,000 types of living things will have gone extinct before we get a chance to witness their existence.

What about all those species that lived, but we’ll never discover?

Based on the data scientists have currently, most species tend to exist for a period of 3 million years, at most, before they disappear. “Disappear”, in this instance, means went extinct.

The fossil record as we know it comes almost entirely from evidence found in sedimentary rock, which generally is only found very near the surface of the planet. Over the huge expanse of geologic time, billions of years, via plate tectonics, volcanism and asteroid impacts, most of those deposits that have ever existed have been subsumed into much deeper layers of the planet. We will, likely, never have teams of paleontologists searching for fossils twenty miles below the surface.

When you consider the countless potential species of microscopic organisms, which multiply so quickly and have such short generations, there have likely existed many billions of species on Earth since the dawn of life.

All of life as we currently know it, everything we see living around us today, represents at most half a billion years of evolution. Every recognizable form of life, from flowers to insects to dinosaurs to deer, evolved in less than 1/8th of the time life has been on Earth.

So much time is unaccounted for, so much evolution, that there may have been enough time for multiple entire other complete evolutionary trees to develop before being totally wiped clean from the face of the planet.

Think about that some more:

Earth is not OUR Earth. It’s belonged to living things for so long that there may have been advanced, even intelligent, species to come along billions of years ago. It’s just been so long, with so many geologic changes along the way, that any evidence of their time here could never be uncovered.

Where do we, humans, fit into this?

Home neanderthalensis, Neanderthals, only existed for a few hundred thousand years before being put out of business by modern humans, Homo sapiens. All of the genus Homo has only been around for roughly 2.5 million years.

Apes, as whole, have only existed for 15 million years, while modern sharks have managed to thrive for more than ten times that amount of time.

Will modern humans still be around in a million years? 100,000 years? 1,000 years? There are ample reasons to assume we may not be here in 100 years.

If we do manage to survive for millennia more, then we may have a chance to “disappear” like so many other species have: Our species slowly transforming over time into NEW species, perhaps because we transport populations off-planet (as Elon Musk and NASA plan to do shortly).

Homo sapiens is the latest branch in a singular limb of the evolutionary tree. We have caused the extinction of many other of our fellow species, and continue to do so, at an alarming rate. If we make it past our current two minutes to midnight setting on the Doomsday Clock, then we may be the ancestors to numerous other species that progress through oncoming millions, maybe even billions, of years remaining until the Earth is swallowed up when our dear Sun becomes a red giant.

It will take a concerted effort of our best and brightest to overcome the harm we do to our planet and to ourselves.

Thank you for reading and sharing!

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by + 373,685 people.