“Humans are strange…We are the aliens,” observes Columbia University astrophysicist, Caleb Scharf, noting that humans are a striking anomaly in the natural world. “We also have a truly outsize impact on the planetary environment without much in the way of natural attrition to trim our influence (at least not yet). “Like a Sudden Invasion by Extraterrestrials” “But the strangest thing of all,” notes Scharf for Scientific American, “is how we generate, exploit, and propagate information that is not encoded in our heritable genetic material, yet travels with us through ...