Finally, all secrets would be revealed. Mulder and Scully would be vindicated, and the Truth that was once “Out There” would burst into the public domain. Courtesy of NASA, today we were to receive official confirmation that, yes, we are not alone in the universe: life had been found on other planets.

To those who believed the above, the highly-hyped NASA press-conference at 2pm EST today fell woefully below expectations. Instead of  news of little green men, we received details of tiny “white” microbes whose origin was decidedly terrestrial: a lake in California. While some parts of California might seem otherworldly, the discovery of earth-bound bacteria seems worlds away (literally) from the aliens we might have envisaged. We could be tempted to feel disappointed, even cheated, that the magnitude of the discovery didn’t match our hopes and dreams.

We should resist such temptation, however, because although these microbes (called GFAJ-1) are earthly in origin they are alien in constitution. For, as Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a NASA Astrobiology Research Fellow working at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, and the research team’s lead scientist explains, “what we’ve found is a microbe doing something new – building parts of itself out of arsenic”. This is important because hitherto phosphorus was considered essential for creating some of the building blocks of life:

Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur are the six basic building blocks of all known forms of life on Earth. Phosphorus is part of the chemical backbone of DNA and RNA, the structures that carry genetic instructions for life, and is considered an essential element for all living cells.

– See NASA’s press release, from which this information is taken, here

GFAJ-1, living in the arsenic-rich, phosphorus-poor Mono Lake, is capable of substituting the phosphorus with arsenic, creating part of its “chemical backbone” in a way that has never before been recorded. As Wolfe-Simon says “All life we know is the same biochemically, and this is a little different. It is suggesting there is another way to be alive.”

So what?

So, we now know that forms of life are possible, and have evolved on this planet, employing mechanisms which before only existed in the wildest speculations of science-fiction authors – a point not lost on Carl Pilcher, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at the agency’s Ames Research Center. There are alternate routes by which life can arise, and some of these routes traverse boundaries we used to consider impassable. And, therefore, the possibility that life might exist on other planets now seems a little more plausible, a touch closer, a shade brighter.

It has been my observation that Humanists are often moved by the idea that we are not alone in the universe, and that life might exist elsewhere. We want it to be true. At least, I want it to be true. Carl Sagan expresses this desire, this yearning for E.T., through the voice of Ted Arroway in his novel Contact. Ellie, Ted’s daughter, asks “Dad, do you think there’s people on other planets?”, and Ted responds “I don’t know, Sparks. But I guess I’d say if it is just us… seems like an awful waste of space.” Ted’s reply seems profoundly Humanistic to me: he acknowledges he does not know, but he nonetheless hopes for something out there. It seems to make sense, then, that when Ellie encounters what might be aliens later in the book, they communicate in the form of her father. Ted, more than anyone, embodied Ellie’s hope – Sagan might even have termed it a faith – that we are not alone. Her yearning for E.T.

Why do I and so many other Humanists share Ellie’s yearning? Why do we care what might be out there? Certainly, in my case, there are simple matters of my history: I was literally brought up on Star Trek, and loved visiting the Planetarium with my grandfather. My childhood heroes were Captain Picard and Superman. I have always been fascinated by Science Fiction.

But I think the reasons go deeper than this. The finding that life exists on other planets, if it ever comes, would be of profound existential significance – it would be, as the American Humanist Association has rightly pointed out, a catalyst for theological debate. Our conception of ourselves as human beings would have to radically change were we to find life on other planets. Intelligent or not, that life would prove that the incredible biodiversity we enjoy on Earth is but a single point on a spectrum of life-bearing worlds. Like the famous image of the Pale Blue Dot taken by Voyager 1, such a discovery would require us to reassess our significance within the vast breadth of the cosmos. And, so the Humanist hopes, as we re-evaluate ourselves in the light cast by an alien other, we would come to realize that those differences – of race, of creed, of sexuality, of sex and gender – those differences which once seemed so very significant, pale in comparison with the backbone of our shared humanity.

Today’s discovery – the discovery of “another way to be alive” – should lead us to consider another way we could be alive. Humankind, together on our pale blue dot, forever looking outward into space, yearning for E.T.

“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Look again at that dot [about halfway down the brown band to the right]. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam…There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

– Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space