thinking-aloud -- alien life may be so different from what we are familiar with ... that we may not even recognize it as life when we encounter it first the d

thinking-aloud -- alien life may be so different from what we are familiar with ... that we may not even recognize it as life when we encounter it first the differences may be in sheer size of the organism -- think licens and moss at planetary scale -- or even loosely collected soup or vapors of chemicals the difference could be in metabolism that we may need 4-5 generations of humans to see them live and grow and die -- or they might live for only a fraction of a second just like there are billions of microbes living in each of our bodies (and they have no mental capacity to comprehend us or our world) ... we may in-turn be microbes inside a much grander macro-cosm that we can never wrap our heads around