This just in: Alien life may exist among us, according to a BBC News story. As if that's a surprise. Have you seen "Teletubbies"?

What's startling is that this revelation didn't come out of a Star Trek convention; it came out of the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Chicago. A physicist from Arizona State University told the assembled lab coats that alien or "weird" life may be living right here on Earth, possibly in your town or right next to you on the bus, which, again, wouldn't surprise me a bit.

Astute readers will recognize this revolutionary scientific theory as the premise of "Men in Black," proving once again that there's nothing so extraordinary in life that Hollywood can't make it feel like a rerun.

Professor Paul Davies says that there may be life forms totally unlike anything we know living in hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean or in lakes contaminated with arsenic. Astute readers will recognize this as the premise of "Arsenic and Old Lakes," starring Cary Grant as a wacky EPA administrator.

The BBC story quotes professor Davies as telling the symposium, "We don't have to go to other planets to find weird life. It could be right in front of our noses -- or even in our noses."

Have you seen those creepy Mucinex commercials? The ones with the big green blob named Mr. Mucus? Newspapers can't charge for their content online, but somebody paid an ad agency for an animated gob of snot wearing a hat. If that's not weird life, I am simply not adequately medicated.

The theme of this symposium that the professor spoke at was an alternate genesis of life on Earth, a "shadow biosphere" that started separately from the history of life as we know it and has evolved parallel to our known biosphere but undetected by us because … wasn't this an episode of "The Twilight Zone"? Or "Ghost Hunters"? Or a conversation you had really, really late one night at college in a very smoky room?

Seriously, the other biosphere is invisible to us because we don't know how to look for it. We've built instruments and technology to look for what we expected to find, like carbon-based microbes and critters with DNA like ours, but as professor Davies puts it, "Maybe one of the elements life uses -- carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus -- could be replaced by something else." Like what? Peanut butter?

"When I say that," the professor went on, "everyone immediately thinks of silicon life, because of 'Star Trek.' " Well, not everyone. But I do remember that episode. That's where we got the immortal line, "Dammit, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a bricklayer."

"But I'm not talking about anything that drastic," the professor said. "For example, most of the jobs that can be done by phosphorus can be done by arsenic." Just the way most of the jobs that can be done by peanuts can be done by cashews or macadamias, and you don't think about that because you're used to peanut butter, but then you go to Trader Joe's and you see cashew butter and sunflower seed butter and pumpkin butter and you think, wow, I may need to rethink my whole relationship with jelly.

There's a guy at the University of Florida whose team has created "an artificial synthetic chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution" that comes pretty close to being an artificial life form.

"You have to have a graduate student stand there and feed it from time to time, but it is evolving," he said.

Astute readers will recognize this as the premise of "Little Shop of Horrors." Whatever they grow in that lab, I don't want it taking a carbon-based life form's job or living in my nose. Especially if it wears a hat.