How will we know that we've found alien life?

[ocpaul20]

On 1/5/2020 at 1:43 AM, GlitterRose said:

Picturing an octopus flying a UFO is hilarious.

Maybe they have vehicles which supply them with life support. Very much like robots where they are the 'brains', daleks, or  the tripods in war of the worlds? One of the Men in Black aliens had an alien within(controlling) a human-shaped body too.

[Robotic Jew]

17 hours ago, ocpaul20 said:

Maybe they have vehicles which supply them with life support. Very much like robots where they are the 'brains', daleks, or  the tripods in war of the worlds? One of the Men in Black aliens had an alien within(controlling) a human-shaped body too.

I picture it to be something like a human body but the octopus is on top like a Toupee.

[stereologist]

On 1/4/2020 at 10:28 AM, thelion318 said:

The octopus has a biology not like any other creature on Earth. It *could* be an alien life form and we currently do not recognize it as such. Same for many bacteria "discovered" each year. Bias blinds us

The octopus is clearly a mollusc and has an earthly origin. The article that was published has been soundly rejected by their peers.

A mistake often made and I have made it myself at times is that a published paper is a paper that gets to be reviewed by scientists. Publication does not mean it is correct.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/octopus-aliens-scientists-theory-meteors-space-earth-cambrian-explosion-a8358631.html

Quote

First off, as Mark Carnall from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History pointed out in a series of tweets, not one of the paper’s authors is a zoologist. 

Much of the authors’ speculation rests on the idea that the genetics of octopuses and their relatives are mysterious – yet a 2015 paper published in Nature revealed the octopus genome, so this is rather disingenuous.

In fact, octopus genes suggest they fit into the generally understood theory of the evolution of life on Earth, and require no alien invasion. They are thought to have split from the squid lineage around 135 million years ago.

Molecular geneticist Professor Karin Moelling of the Max Planck Institute Molecular Genetics, who was asked to review the report, concluded that it "cannot be taken seriously”.

The primary reason for doubt given by Professor Moelling is that there is “no evidence at all”.