Living Among Us

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Where might investigators look for alien organisms on Earth today? Some scientists have focused on searching for organisms occupying a niche that is ecologically isolated, lying beyond the reach of ordinary known life. One of the surprising discoveries in recent years is the ability of known life to endure extraordinarily harsh conditions. Microbes have been found inhabiting extreme environments ranging from scalding volcanic vents to the dry valleys of Antarctica. Other so-called extremophiles can survive in salt-saturated lakes, highly acidic mine tailings contaminated with metals, and the waste pools of nuclear reactors. Despite shaggy hair, glazed eyes, and visibly clammy skin perpetually making him look as though he just did a bump in the bathroom, Mike (Thomas Ian Nicholas) apparently has credibility as a Ken Burns-caliber documentarian. For a job as important as filming an in-depth exposé on a vampire family, it naturally makes sense that Mike’s station manager Aaron (James Russo, billed third despite appearing in only three scenes, two of which are via video) pairs Mike with his inexperienced brother-in-law Benny and the saddest selection of “professional” recording equipment anyone has ever seen (the Hi8 camera is essential for its night vision mode, we’re told). Their efforts are all for naught though, as two other housemates, charming Blake ( Andrew Keegan) and brooding Selvin ( Chad Todhunter), secretly show the camera crew a darker side of vampirism: burning in sunlight and an insatiable bloodlust.

The “family” consists of Elleanor ( Esme Bianco), the “mother; Andrew ( John Heard), the “father”, Blake ( Andrew Keegan), the “son” with the only whiff of character development; and Selvin ( Chad Todhunter), the dark and broody “son” you know wants to kill everyone. The crew is told the “rules” of the house, i.e. no recording their “rituals” and don’t go in the basement, which, of course, we know won’t be heeded.Anxious to portray vampires as pacifists, Andrew dispels common beliefs about vampires as myths while explaining their physiology in medical terms. Elleanor claims that Andrew saved her from a fatal illness by turning her into a vampire. After the war, Wiesenthal launched the Documentation Centre of the Association of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Regime in Vienna in the ’60s and became a Mossad agent. While he probably wasn’t instrumental in the capture of Adolf Eichmann, as some were led to believe, he did help find other Nazis, notably Karl Silberbauer, the Gestapo officer who arrested Anne Frank, and Franz Stangl, the commander of the Treblinka and Sobibor camps. He also provided key intelligence on many former Nazi officials. Wiesenthal died in 2005. Being the opportunistic animals that they are, what they eat varies greatly. Some foxes will eat from gardens. Some eat out of garbage dumpsters. They will hang around restaurants, waiting for them to throw out scraps. If such a strategy were successful, researchers would face the difficulty of determining whether they were dealing with a genuine alternative form of life descended from a separate origin or with merely a new domain of known life, such as archaea, which were not identified until the late 1970s. In other words, how can scientists be sure that what seems like a new tree of life is not in fact an undiscovered branch of the known tree that split away a very long time ago and has so far escaped our attention? In all likelihood, the earliest life-forms were radically different from those that followed. For example, the sophisticated triplet DNA code for specifying particular amino acids shows evidence of being optimized in its efficiency by evolutionary selection. This observation suggests the existence of a more rudimentary precursor, such as a doublet code employing only 10, rather than 20, amino acids. It is conceivable that some primitive organisms are still using the old precursor code today. Such microbes would not be truly alien but more like living fossils. Nevertheless, their discovery would still be of immense scientific interest. Another possible holdover from an earlier biological epoch would be microbes that use RNA in place of DNA. The Klarsfelds were arrested multiple times during their Nazi-hunting careers, including Serge in Germany in 1972 for trying to kidnap former SS official Kurt Lischka and Beate in Syria for attempting to capture Alois Brunner, Eichmann’s assistant.

The majority of escaped Nazi war criminals made their way to South America after the war through escape routes called “ratlines.” Countries like Argentina and Brazil became safe havens where these Nazi officials lived in anonymity.

Such life would exist in a “ shadow biosphere”. By that, I don’t mean a ghost realm, but undiscovered creatures probably with a different biochemistry. This means we can’t study or even notice them because they are outside of our comprehension. Assuming it exists, such a shadow biosphere would probably be microscopic. An easier test of biological determinism may be possible, however. No planet is more Earth-like than Earth itself, so if life does emerge readily under terrestrial conditions, then perhaps it formed many times on our home planet. To pursue this tantalizing possibility, scientists have begun searching deserts, lakes and caverns for evidence of “alien” life-forms—organisms that would differ fundamentally from all known living creatures because they arose independently. Most likely, such organisms would be microscopic, so researchers are devising tests to identify exotic microbes that could be living among us. The horror comedy Living Among Us is a fun, fresh take on the vampire sub genre that successfully delivers both solid comedy and satisfying gore. That said, there are arguments in favour of silicon-based life on Earth. Nature is adaptable. A few years ago, scientists at Caltech managed to breed a bacterial protein that created bonds with silicon – essentially bringing silicon to life. So even though silicon is inflexible compared with carbon, it could perhaps find ways to assemble into living organisms, potentially including carbon.

And right off the bat, I’d like to get something out of the way. I really like documentary-style and Found Footage, but the glitchy cameras have to stop. It’s 2018, and cameras just don’t do that anymore. We’re more likely to not get any footage at all if the video was in any way corrupted, instead of a pixelated mess. This is especially true because the crew is filming a family of vampires, not ghosts or any other paranormal-type monster. The origin of life is one of the great unsolved problems of science. Nobody knows how, where or when life originated. About all that is known for certain is that microbial life had established itself on Earth by about three and a half billion years ago. In the absence of hard evidence of what came before, there is plenty of scope for disagreement. The answer to that is a little complicated — yes, in the decades after the Holocaust, Jewish and non-Jewish scholars and survivors worked to bring Nazis to justice. Some were American and some were European. A more exciting but also more speculative possibility is that alternative life-forms have survived and are still present in the environment, constituting a kind of shadow biosphere, a term coined by Carol Cleland and Shelley Cop­ley of the University of Colorado at Boulder. At first this idea might seem preposterous; if alien organisms thrived right under our noses (or even in our noses), would not scientists have discovered them already? It turns out that the answer is no. The vast majority of organisms are microbes, and it is almost impossible to tell what they are simply by looking at them through a microscope. Microbiologists must analyze the genetic sequences of an organism to determine its location on the tree of life—the phylogenetic grouping of all known creatures—and researchers have classified only a tiny fraction of all observed microbes.

Your Home for Horror

Foxes in urban environments mostly hunt and feed on rodents. This is one reason large cities are a place where they thrive. Living Among Us is a new fantasy/horror written and directed by Brian A. Metcalf. Though the vampire genre has been beaten like a dead horse, when I saw this trailer, I thought maybe I’d be pleasantly surprised with a new twist. Unfortunately, it’s just another cliché of a cliché. He started his Nazi hunting shortly after being liberated from the Mauthausen camp. Still emaciated and frail, Wiesenthal began documenting names and details of Nazis and collaborators, from guards to Gestapo officials. To find it, we have to somehow think outside of the terrestrial biology box and figure out ways of recognising lifeforms that are fundamentally different from the carbon-based form. There are plenty of experiments testing out these alternative biochemistries, such as the one from Caltech.