"The definition of life has just expanded," said Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at the agency's Headquarters in Washington. "As we pursue our efforts to seek signs of life in the solar system, we have to think more broadly, more diversely and consider life as we do not know it."Well... duh. I can't believe they spent time and effort to come up with that. Shit, there's crazy as hell things living on Earth.
Not today, Randy. Not today.
One of my friends sent me a text about how NASA found a life form that's radically different from us, as in Earth wide. My first thought was, is it edible? My second thought, what does it taste like? Reading about it later on I felt kind of disappointed by the whole thing. But then again my mind is warped by 2 decades of science fiction and relatively access to science news through a variety of media has exposed me to all sorts of cool things.
I actually just read a really good story in The Mammoth Book Of Extreme Science Fiction anthology about first contact with extraterrestrial life. The Story is Wang's Carpets by Greg Egan. At first they think that it's a kind of plant, but then they figure out that the thing is a single gargantuan cell, and then things get interesting. The whole anthology is pretty cool, as in every collection of stories there are some I couldn't get into but there's a bunch more stories I really liked in different flavors of sci fi. The first story that jumps to mind is Death In The Promise Land by Pat Cadigan, it features virtual realities, murder, and good old fashioned gumshoeing; however, looking at the contents it's hard to pick out one story I liked above the rest. Good times. I still think that The Mammoth Book Of Mammoths would be a hit.
Also science fiction-esque is the deployment of the XM25, cool! I can't wait for this thing to start popping up in ridiculous action movies.
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