What in the world - the universe - is out there?

I don't know. No one knows. But stories such as this one - deriving from the very responsible source, Nature - certainly raise your curiosity a few notches.

Here's how it starts:

Astronomers detected unusually high quantities of carbon, the basis of all terrestrial life, in an infant solar system around nearby star Beta Pictoris, 63 light-years away.

For years we've looked to this early forming solar system as one that might be going through the same processes our own solar system did when the rocky planets, including Earth, were forming," commented lead author Aki Roberge,* who began the research while at Carnegie's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. "But we got a big surprise--there is much more carbon gas than we expected. Something very different is going on."

The research, published in the June 8, 2006, Nature, suggests that either carbon-rich asteroids or comets, unlike any in our own solar system, have vaporized, or that bodies outgassing carbon-bearing species such as methane contribute the curious carbon excess.

So does that mean there's life out there? And maybe nearby - well, nearby by Universe standards? No. Yes. Maybe. Wouldn't it be weird if we were alone? Wouldn't it be weirder if we're looking at all sorts of other life forms and can't see them? The what ifs are endless. Maybe there's an intelligence whose structure simply escapes our detection system. Afterall, we're designed to detect a tiny portion of the elctromagnetic spectrum. Our machines extend that capability tremendously - in the electromagnetic spectrum. And we act as if that's all there is, but is it?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not looking for a spiritual world out there beyond our detection. I'm not looking for ghosts or anything super natural. I'm just wondering if we are being far too parochial in the way we define "reality" and "natural." We have plenty of small examples on earth of creatures who "see" a far different world then we see - perhaps because they depend entirely on sound waves bouncing off of objects, or maybe they can detect more in the infrared area than we do, or they don't take the visible light spectrum apart into constituent colors the way we do - or maybe their world is built mainly around smell which relays far more information to many other animals than it does to us.

Then, of course, we have all those different ways for transferring information - like as I sit here at the keyboard I'm surrounded by - penetrated by - radio and television waves continuously and I'm totally unaware of them. They don't contain sounds and images, of course - just the information to recreate sounds and images in the proper detection system.

But what are we if we're not simply specialized detection devices built to experience the world through our particular system of detectors - and so we get it in our head that what our system of detectors reveal of the world is the alpha and omega of things. And maybe it isn't. And maybe it is. So stories, such as this one, get me thinking because what is discovered surprises the experts and where there are surprises there is always the chance to open up new pathways and these new pathsways may lead us somewhere quite different than we imagine.