By ‘aliens’ the writer of this article is talking about a species that has evolved independently of known life.

The basic idea is this:
Nonlife can turn into life.
If life can appear on earth once then there’s no reason that it can’t have happened twice, or still be happpening all around us.
If we can prove it’s happened twice, that tells us that it’s a relatively common event (on an astronomical scale).
If the beginning of life is a common occurence then that significantly increases the chances that it has happened in many other places.
… But first we have to find life that hasn’t descended from the same ancestor as all of the rest of us!

This little article is about the search for life that is descended from a fresh ancestor – life with which we have no common living ancestry. ALIENS! Click here to read it!

Between a couple of months and two years, apparently. That’s a lot of water, very fast.

So, interesting stuff to think about, but the best bit has got to be in the comments when the Christian who posts saying that geologists could save a lot of time by starting from the Bible and working out from there. Religious extremists: as long as you lock the weapons away, then they’re a constant source of amusement.

What’s bigger than the sun exploding? Well, an object with the mass of eleven suns exploding. Astronomers have witnessed an antimatter supernova. There are many complex things going on inside the whole mess, but the result is this – compared to the scale of this release of energy, our lives are absolutely nothing at all. Now, you could use that as a reason to feel down about our insignificance, or you could turn it to think how lucky we are to even exist in the first place, how incredibly unique we are, and how amazing the universe is that we live in. Seriously. It’s a wonderful and awesome world out there.

Ever looked at something small and horrible and thought ‘I wonder what would happen if a huge version of that existed?’ Well, wonder no more. (Contains swearing, but it is rather funny.)