If there is alien life on Everest, do we really want to find it? Anything tough enough to survive in the harsh environment of Mt. Everest could be a serious threat to mankind. To illustrate this point, here are two stories that clearly portray the dangers of searching for alien life in the frozen and hostile climates of Earth.

Story #1 is H.P. Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness, the terrifying story of a scientific expedition to the arctic that discovers the ruins of a vast alien civilization and the preserved remains of highly evolved creatures that aren’t as dead as they appear.

Story #2 is John Carpenter’s The Thing, which recounts another arctic expedition’s encounter with a deadly alien organism that’d been frozen under the ice for hundreds of thousands of years.

If you don’t knkow these stories, we highly recommend you familiarize yourself with them. They are a clear warning against the current exploration for alien life on Mt. Everest.

Here’s the trailer for The Thing.

The documentary District 9 is a long overdue film about the serious issue of alien refugees.  The resources of the universe cannot support the rapid growth of the universal population, and this is not the first, nor the last, case of alien civilizations being cast off of their home worlds due to overcrowding, pollution, and planetary apocalypses.

Theorists say Earth could be next in this disturbing trend of planetary exile.  So far we’ve been lucky in that most of the alien refugees hoping to make our world their new home are not hostile, but analysts say we must be careful to not appear to weak as we accept more and more alien exiles.

“You can liken it to the position the Obama administration is finding themselves in with international relations,” says political correspondent Dan McGruffy.  “President Obama is being simultaneously praised and criticized with his open arms approach to foreign policy, the fear being that we will appear weak.  At the same time, there is no doubt that America needs to heal damaged relationships with foreign nations.  The same problems arise with interstellar exiles.  We do not want to appear harsh and insensitive while making it clear we will defend our resources.  The question arises, who does Earth belong to?  Earthlings?  Or the universe?  Do we have a fundamental duty to provide life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to all beings?  The bottom line is, as our population grows and we continue to accept more alien exiles, we risk accelerating the depletion of Earth’s resources, and we might find ourselves exiled as well.”

What do you think?  Is it our duty to provide for interstellar exiles?  What is the appropriate response to their needs?

Placozoa are small, living, blobs of cells. They feed through their ‘skin’, can regenerate from only a small amount of cells, and reproduce asexually by splitting off parts of themselves. However, they have only rarely been observed in nature and scientists have yet to find any fossils of Placozoans.

Image of a Placozoa.

A new theory by our resident space biologist Allen Gringholm states that Placozoa are actually descendants of a massive blob of an alien which crashed into Earth millions of years ago.  The force of the impact broke it into pieces which shot into the atmosphere and spread all over the planet. Due to the resilient nature of this creature, the disparate parts of its body were able to survive as a new form of life. Dr. Gringholm has some concerns about the presence of the unassuming creatures on our planet.

“These small creatures might seem simple, but I’d argue that their attributes are extraordinarily dangerous if these Placozoa ever came together and attempted to reform into a being similar to their blob of an ancestor, which I believe was a massive and intelligent space traveling organism. Consider the fact that Placozoa are virtually indestructible, invisible from different angles, and can absorb food through their ‘skin’. Sounds like a fearsome opponent. People might dismiss The Blob as hokey sci-fi horror. However, the fiction might be closer to fact than we’d like to acknowledge.”

Dr. Gringholm says his research is ongoing.  Read more about Placozoa here.