Many experts concur that there is other life in the universe - if not a little than an abundance - including beings much like ourselves who are millions of years more advanced. Whether or not you believe these beings have managed to bridge the distance required to visit us, one distinct thread runs though nearly all UFO reports: silence.

Gigantic crafts hovering, zooming or flashing overhead without so much as a peep of smoke or groan of an engine. Mention of sound is scantly present in the droves of UFO documentation, and if anything it is the absence of sound that is remarked upon, often with exclamatory glee: "Totally silent!" What's notable is that a soundless machine is probably running with almost zero waste, or near 100 percent efficiency - an immaculate system with every part exploited in full and no harm done to the other parts or to the environment. In other words, a system much like those found in nature.

If building zero-waste machines is one aspect of achieving interstellar travel, we may one day look back at the turn of the 21st century as the time when humans began to look at industrial design in such a way as to make this possible. How? By consulting the ultimate teacher - Mother Nature.

"If you want to look for things to be done in a better way, you've got to look for who's the best teacher, who's done it best," said Jay Harman, a scientist and entrepreneur. "Well, nature's done it best: untold experiments with an open research budget. Nature's got it down." Harman runs San Rafael's PAX (Latin for peace) Scientific, a company with numerous patents, all for inventions inspired by nature. He is just one of many experienced biomimics doing their work in the Bay Area.

Some of the most advanced work in the field is being done here, on both the corporate and academic level. Students and teachers at local universities are exploring biomimicry research and education as companies such JDS Uniphase in Milpitas and Qualcomm in San Jose turn to nature's ingenuity for their designs. All this is just a microcosm of what's going on globally, where biomimicry is a burgeoning science.

"It's beginning to be de rigueur for people to ask: How have other organisms solved this problem?" said Janine Benyus, who coined the word biomimicry in her 1997 book, "Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature." By then a few designs inspired by nature had already reached the mass market. Alexander Graham Bell studied the middle ear as part of his research in designing the telephone, and in 1948 Swiss naturalist George de Mestral dreamed up the idea for Velcro when he and his dog returned from a hike covered with burrs. One of the first known biomimics was Leonardo da Vinci, whose "flying machine" sketches were based on bird wings, an idea the Wright brothers later made use of in the first airplane. But it's only been in the past decade that biomimicry has started to take off as a science, for two reasons: One, the acute and widespread awareness of global warming and the diminishment of natural resources, and two, the rapid development of computers - because biomimicry, especially at the molecular level, is extremely complicated.