There is, of course, the notion that extraterrestrial life could have evolved to be so different than ourselves that we wouldn’t recognize it. Yet what if our misunderstanding of life is even more basic – and obvious – than that?

What if life so vast, that we’re swimming within its protoplasm and calling that substrate spacetime. Or what if it’s so microscopic that it lives on our skin, and within our cells and brains, erecting its civilization or its biome upon us or within us, as the case may be, just the way bacteria and viruses do. For the vast majority of human history, microscopic organisms we now recognize as obvious lifeforms were undetectable and therefore unknown to us. Yet bacteria alone are estimated to represent the second largest proportion of biomass on the planet accounting for a whopping nonillion organisms. That’s 10 followed by 30 zeroes.  And the impact that microscopic lifeforms have had on humanity has been enormous. No one knew what caused the Black Death, but that didn’t stop it from killing 50 million people in Europe alone and upending civilizations.  

Otherworldly life may be so large, so miniscule, or so foreign to our understanding of life, that we just don’t recognize it as life. Recently, scientists published a paper in which it was theorized that sprites, ball lightning and other phenomenon related to lightning, which the researchers collectively referred to as plasmoids, may actually be a lifeform which originated in earth’s atmosphere or possibly on nearby planets or moons. If these plasma-based phenomena  are organisms, they’ve been right in front of us since our beginnings without us even knowing it.

Life may be so obvious that we can’t see it. Rocks may live in ways we can’t fathom. ‘Alien’ life may be so close that we don’t recognize it. We may be so myopic in our understandings, in our definitions and in our abilities to detect it, that life may be right at the tips of our noses, animated in every inanimate thing and force. We think life has form, but maybe it’s formless. We think it must require and possess and expend energy, but it may be nonenergetic. We may so dense in our material forms that we can’t comprehend its ethereal nature. Or we may so dense in another way – so ignorant, so blind – that we can’t see that we’re staring right at it, and that it’s looking right back at us.

© 2025 by Michael C. Just