Aliens Are Here

Take Me to Your Leader

Close your eyes for a second. Imagine you are an alien.

You have travelled across the stars in your spaceship. You have crossed empty space for a thousand years. And finally, you see a small blue planet. It is beautiful. It is glowing. You point your ship at it and land.

Now here is a question nobody asks:

Most movies tell us aliens will land in New York. Or Washington. Or on top of a big building. They meet a president. They shake hands. They say "take me to your leader."

But that is a story written by humans, for humans. The real answer is much stranger. And much funnier.

Let us walk through it together.

Earth Is Mostly Water

Here is a fact we forget: 70% of Earth is water.

Seven out of every ten steps you could take on Earth would be a splash, not a step. If an alien spaceship picked a random spot on the planet to land, the odds are high they would land in the ocean.

So picture this. The spaceship splashes down somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. The door opens. The alien looks around. What does it see?

Water. Endless water. Fish. Jellyfish. Octopus. Whales. Coral.

This alien would spend weeks, maybe years, swimming around, trying to talk to dolphins and whales. Which honestly is not a crazy idea. Dolphins are smart. Whales sing songs that travel across the whole ocean. Octopuses can solve puzzles and escape from jars. If an alien met an octopus before it met a human, it might decide the octopus is the smarter one.

And honestly? It might be right.

Bacteria Are Everywhere

Let us say the alien finally figures out that there is land. It flies over to the beach.

Now it starts looking for life. And here is where it gets strange.

Scientists counted up all the living stuff on Earth. Not by how many animals or plants there are, but by how much they all weigh when you add them together. This is called biomass. Think of it like putting every living thing on a giant weighing scale.

Guess what came out on top?

Let that sink in. Animals are basically a rounding error. We are less than half of one percent of the living stuff on this planet.

So the alien, looking around carefully, would notice bacteria everywhere. In the dirt. In the air. In water drops. Living in ice. Living in boiling hot springs. Living inside rocks. Living 5 kilometres under the ground.

Bacteria have been on Earth for 3.5 billion years. Humans have been here for about 300,000 years. If you turned Earth's history into a one-hour movie, humans would show up in the last 4 seconds. Bacteria are there from minute one.

What If the Alien Is Small?

Now here is a wild thought.

We always imagine aliens being our size. Like humans, but green. Or tall and thin. Or big with tentacles. But our size.

Why?

Size is relative. There is no rule in the universe that says intelligent life has to be our size. What if the aliens are the size of a grain of sand? What if they are the size of a single cell?

If the aliens are tiny, then bacteria are giants to them. Bacteria would be the big, powerful beings of Earth. The aliens might be living among them right now, making friends with them, building tiny spaceships, teaching bacteria their alien language.

For all we know, this has already happened. And we are just too big and clumsy to notice.

The Plants Are the Real Bosses

Okay, let us say the alien figures out the size thing. It figures out that bacteria are tiny. It makes itself bigger. It looks around properly.

Now it sees the real champions of Earth: plants.

Here is the thing about plants that most humans never stop to think about.

Plants are also weirdly varied. A mushroom, a rose, a giant tree, a tiny grass, a carrot, a cactus. They come in every shape and size and colour. They give us fruits. They give us shade. They give us wood. They give us medicine.

So now the alien looks at all this and thinks: "Wait. These plant things are amazing. They live forever. They eat light. They are everywhere. They are connected to each other. They built the air. They feed everything else. THIS is the real civilisation of Earth."

And the alien might be right again.

What if aliens themselves look like plants? What if somewhere far away in space, there is a planet where the presidents and scientists and kings are all shaped like trees and grass? They might land on Earth, see our forests, and feel at home. They might think they finally found their cousins.

Meanwhile, they would look at animals, birds, cows, lions, humans running around, and think: "Aw, cute little moving machines. Probably pets. The plants must have made them to help with chores."

And Humans? We Are Nothing.

Here is the most humbling fact in this whole article.

Out of all life on Earth, humans are 0.01%.

Even among animals, we are tiny. We are only 2.5% of animal life. The cows, pigs, and chickens we raise for food weigh more than all humans put together. Way more.

There are more ants than humans. There are more bacteria in your mouth than there are humans on Earth. There is more plant weight in a single big forest than in the whole human species.

So if an alien visited Earth and made a list of "important life forms to talk to," humans would not be in the top 5. Maybe not the top 50. We just happen to be the ones writing the reports, so we put ourselves first.

Why Do We Think Aliens Will Look Like Us?

This is the biggest joke of all.

Walk into any movie. Look at any alien. Count the eyes: usually two. Count the legs: usually two. Count the arms: usually two. Head on top. Face in the front. Mouth below nose. Eyes above nose.

In other words: aliens in movies look like humans in costumes. Because they are. They are actors in makeup.

But think about it for one second. Why would an alien, born on a planet we have never seen, under a sun we have never touched, breathing air we have never tasted, look like us?

The human body is not some perfect design of the universe. It is a body that worked for one type of ape on the African savanna. Our two legs are for walking long distances. Our eyes face forward because we were hunters. Our hands are for making tools on solid ground. Our height is for the gravity of Earth.

Change the planet and everything changes.

The truth is, if we look at what life on Earth looks like on average, the average living thing is microscopic, single-celled, has no eyes, has no legs, lives in water or soil, and just sits there and grows.

That is the normal shape of life. Humans are the weird exception, not the rule.

So if aliens exist somewhere in the universe, the odds that they look like us, two arms, two legs, one head, are almost zero. The odds that they look like bacteria, or grass, or a coral reef, or a slime mould, or something we do not even have a word for, those odds are much, much higher.

The Final Thought

There is a book called Solaris by a Polish writer named Stanislaw Lem. In the book, humans travel to a faraway planet and find a giant ocean. But the ocean is not just water. The whole ocean is one alien mind. One huge being, thinking thoughts across millions of kilometres.

The humans in the book try to talk to it. They fail. They keep looking for a face, a voice, a person. The ocean keeps trying to reach back. But they are too different. They cannot understand each other. Not because the alien is stupid. Because the humans are stuck looking for a mirror of themselves.

This might be the real story of aliens and Earth.

Maybe we are not the main character of this story. Maybe we never were.

And maybe that is okay. Because once you stop trying to be the centre of everything, Earth becomes a much more interesting place. A place where trees think. Where bacteria rule. Where oceans talk. Where a single mushroom can be bigger than a whale. Where life has been busy being wonderful for 3.5 billion years, and we only just showed up to watch.

So the next time you look up at the stars and wonder if anyone is out there, remember. They might be. And if they come, they will not land on the White House lawn.

They will land in the ocean. Or on a patch of grass.