Article Posted on : - Jul 08, 2012

LONDON (PTI): Aliens may not actually resemble the little green creatures Hollywood loves to portray them as.

Rather, they are more likely to look like 'giant jellyfish with orange bottoms', if a leading British space scientist is to be believed.

"My vision of aliens is an inhuman, silicon-based life form that looks much more like a jellyfish than sci-fi's little green men. It is likely that there is extra-terrestrial life - it is just more alien than you'd imagine," Maggie Aderin-Pocock, satellite expert and government adviser in UK, said.

As against the little green men so beloved of Hollywood directors, they may look like football-field sized jellyfish, complete with onion-shaped appendages and an orange underbelly or bottom, the Daily Mail reported quoting the scientist.

"But while they might resemble jellyfish, they will live not in the sea but in the atmosphere of a Jupiter-like planet, where they float around," Aderin-Pocock said.

Rather than surviving on carbon, which is the basis of all life, the "silicon generated" creatures are able to live off light absorbed through their 'skin' and chemicals sucked in through their giant mouths.

According to Alderin-Pocock, the orange underside of the creatures acts as camouflage, allowing them to escape predators in a fiery atmosphere, while the onion-like appendages provide as buoyancy sacs, inhaling and letting out gas so it can gain or lose altitude like a hot air balloon.

Most of the country's leading space scientist's inspiration comes from strange life-forms which were discovered living deep beneath the ocean recently.

"Our imaginations are naturally constrained by what we see around us and the conventional wisdom has been that life needs water and is carbon-based," said Dr Aderin-Pocock.

"But some researchers are doing exciting work, playing with ideas such as silicon-based life forms evolving on other planets in environments very different to our own," she said.

However, while the giant jellyfish may be out there, we have little chance of making contact with them.

Dr Aderin-Pocock, believes that while there are billions of planets in our galaxy alone, very few would be able to support life, let alone actually be home to it.

Researches on extraterritorial creatures in Britain have found that almost half of Britons perceive aliens as "little green men".

In a poll of more than 2,000 people for the Royal Society, 44 per cent people were of the opinion that extra-terrestrial life exists.