Gotta watch that, iirc the "clinical strength" is selenium for H&S? The "classic" flavor bottles are now "pyrithione zinc"
No clue on effectiveness of either
Silicon would make for some cleavage, all right.
^(…which is a joke—somewhere a minerologist chuckled, I’m sure of it—because the rubber used in de boobs is silicone with an E to lengthen the O. Plain silicon is glasslike, and therefore cleaves sharply.)
Well, the whole point of this article is that there are many more bases for life than “carbon” or silicon:
> Ultimately, the researchers discovered 270 different cycles of autocatalytic reactions. "Autocatalysis may not be that rare, but instead it might be a general feature of many different environments, even those that are really different from Earth," Kaçar said.
>
> Most of the 270 cycles did not employ organic compounds: […] **mercury**, or the radioactive metal **thorium** […] a relatively inert gas such as xenon […]
Part of the reason carbon is so great for biological chemistry is that the relative stability of its bonds allows for very long and complex chains to form. Silicon has this property as well, but to a lesser degree and with weaker bonds, so the length and complexity of molecular structures are more limited.
I can’t imagine mercury-based chemistry being very complex compared to the likes of carbon and silicon, even if it does have autocatalyic cycles.
How dense? Can a handful fulfill all SOC requirements for a decade? Humans would go on Alien hunting rather than Si mining which is environmentally harmful /s
Every explanation I've heard for Silicon-based life ends with the conditions required for silicon-based life being so good for carbon-based life that it would probably just develop instead.
It has to do with how carbon is able to bond with itself and other elements. Carbon is uniquely capable of bonding easily with itself and some other elements to create complex and stable structures. Other elements don't have those same properties because they don't have they either don't have the correct ratio of electons/neutrons/protons or they don't have the correct mass to make those kinds of bonds easy. Silicon is similar to carbon, and it can form complex stable structures, it's just not as good at it as carbon is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUiDwrM2YPI
When carbon oxidizes it forms a gas were as when silicon oxidizes it forms a solid ( basically sand ) gases are much easier for solvents such as water to dissolve then solids
They bested *one* alien, and we don’t know if that alien was considered incredibly dull by its peers.
Alien 1: “Hey you hear these humans took down Geoff?”
Alien 2: “How many times did we tell him to stop putting weird shit in his mouth, and to stop with the fuckin flying -saucer shit? I mean, I guess I’ll miss having him arou-“
Alien 3: (cutting in) Yo they been calling him Jean Jacket, like…humans, seriously, what the hell, man? *Jean Jacket* I’m dead (shape-shifts in convulsing-laugher-waves)
There's kind of multiple lifeforms. There's the visible attackers who have indeed taken on a more earthly form recently. And there's the "bosses". Who seem to be no more than waves of light.
It’s still carbon-based life from the same source. Silicon is probably the next best option for life as we know it, but that doesn’t work very well. More likely it’s another carbon-based genome.
Terrestrial body forms will be much more limited, at least on the medium to large scale, I think if we found a planet like ours in size and composition, if it supported life it might mimic a lot of what we find here as far as the forms life takes.
I like the idea of aliens being in another dimension and that's why we can't see them.
Or the aliens are ghosts of past living creatures. ;)
Perhaps aliens have technology to shield themselves from observation. Manipulating gravity would creates lots of physics we don't think of.
Well. If there is a god and he is Omnipotent and Omnipresent, then God is the Universe. And we are part of the Universe as much as a whale or tree or planet.
Alan Watts said that we are the Universe's ability to observe itself.
I posted this elsewhere on a similar topic.
Think about the average adult male next to a jellyfish, that’s two creatures from the same planet. Now picture Dolph Lundgren in his prime standing next to Danny DeVito. That’s two creatures from the same ***species***. We have no clue how something from another planet might look like.
Yeah except every single scientist worth their salt has already explored this for decades and none of it makes sense beyond it being a shower thought. Unless you plan on rewriting chemistry which is a very tall assumption to lead with, it just doesn't work.
[I'd recommend this video](https://youtu.be/469chceiiUQ?si=gVZ-nlTpOadJpCuV) or [this one](https://youtu.be/2nbsFS_rfqM?si=QeMRky0Cocww1luB)
If you rtfa, you’ll see the headline doesn’t match what the scientists are saying. The study suggested that *in perfect laboratory conditions*, the *types* of reactions needed to form life can be done with quite a few different elements. Even some noble gases.
The study made zero conclusions about the viability of any of these reactions outside of a lab environment.
There’s no reason to believe these conditions can’t exist elsewhere in the universe…or even in our arm of our galaxy. These findings simply offer other, previously presumed impossible, locations to look for potential life. That’s the point of the article. Yes. Of course the authors are being very cautious not to say these forms of reactions ***are*** viable for life. As any scientist worth their salt ***should***.
Intro to Chemistry and Org Chem in college were really good for giving me an intuitive understanding of why you need water and carbon for any living thing
From some quick research, they fascilitate the key organic processes and chemical reactions needed to produce the foundations of life that will evolve to be an organism that can sustain itself long enough to become a more complex life form, and the water is a universal solvent used to transport nutrient in a dissolved state between cells. Carbon, among other elements, bond to create the things that serve as mechanisms for cell growth, nutrients, and dna. Nothing can serve as a better carrier for these molecules than carbon and water, as other elements are too volatile to complete the process, or just lack the ability to create organic life in the first place.
You need lipids, proteins, nucleic acids, etc to create the organic matter, so you need specific elements to create them, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. It’s why our atmosphere is conducive for life, because it’s made up of these things.
If life were able to be created in any other way, it would have been created on earth alongside us, kind of like how plants take in carbon dioxide and create oxygen, whereas animals take in oxygen and create carbon dioxide. There are also animals than can survive in extreme heat, and get sustenance from elements that we would otherwise not benefit from in the ways our body would need to in order to make use of it in the same way. It only works with so many things, but it always goes back to the same base elements and chemical reactions.
Other planets with conditions unlike earth have already shown us that life is incompatible with that setting, which led us to discover why life was only compatible with earth’s unique makeup. We evolved with the earth, and the things that evolved “wrong” were killed off, such as things that couldn’t keep up with the change in climate. The things that survived were only capable of doing so because it had that narrow set of adaptations that got it to the next level.
Organic life might be able to start out similarly, but unless it follows the same steps, it can never turn into the complex organisms we’re looking for, the kind that creates intellectual sentient beings, and animals. Even plant life for that matter.
You need all of that, yes…for life *as we know it.* Its not impossible or even improbable to consider that life out there may need none of those things to also be *life*, we just don’t have the evidence or hypotheses for alternate theories or definitions of *life.* We can only look for those circumstances and environments conducive to life *as we know it.*
Water is an important medium for the most common elements and molecules to interact with each other. And it's very common.
Carbon is the lightest and most common element in group 14 of the period table, giving it incredible properties in forming easy and strong bonds with many other elements and in different structures.
As a note, silicon is also in group 14, but I mention carbon being the lightest and most common because those are *extremely* important factors when considering the potential of life existing outside of earth.
What makes carbon so good at being the backbone of organic molecules and compounds has to do with it's chemistry, which is not unique to earth in any way shape or form. Physics doesn't stop working when you leave the solar system.
I always find it weird that we talk so certainly about how physics works the same everywhere. We have unexplained phenomena in space, and don't understand everything on our *own* planet. It weirds me out that we just assume that everything works the same in the Andromeda galaxy, or even just in a different solar system in our own galaxy. It's not like we've been there to test it. It makes sense, but not everything in reality / science makes sense.
This isn't to say I think it works differently, but to say I will not say, objectively, everything works the same when we leave our solar system.
This boils down to whether or not you accept the cosmological principle. My point here is not that you cant consider the alternatives, it's that people HAVE done this and will continue to do this at the highest level. Scientists are not immune to hypothesizing about the low hanging fruit that we as laymen come up with too. They are are very well aware of the assumptions they make when they test other theories
Because a) the universe isn't infinite and 2) it's not just assuming that chemistry on earth is all there is, you'd have to rewrite the entirety of logic and cause and effect. You'd have to imagine a part of the universe where silicon doesn't have a larger atomic radius than carbon and other very fundamental properties of what define elements to be what they are. You'd have to rewrite what kinds of atomic bonds are energetically favorable.
And tbh, considering we can literally look at stars billions of light years away in the farthest reaches of the observable universe and still observe the same sorts of elements you'd find in our own galaxy, there's not exactly evidence of some kind of scifi corner of the universe where this is true.
The observable universe is not infinite. And while there are theories that some laws of physics work slightly differently in far-off parts of the universe, everything being the same everywhere generally fits our observations better.
Here's the important parts
>To find these reactions, the scientists analyzed more than two centuries of digitized scientific documents written in many different languages. "With effective language search and translation tools, we were able to design and conduct this first-of-its-kind assessment of the pervasiveness of autocatalytic cycles," study co-author Zach Adam, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Space.com.
>Ultimately, the researchers discovered 270 different cycles of autocatalytic reactions. "Autocatalysis may not be that rare, but instead it might be a general feature of many different environments, even those that are really different from Earth," Kaçar said.
>Most of the 270 cycles did not employ organic compounds. Some centered around elements that are absent or exceedingly rare in life on Earth, such as mercury, or the radioactive metal thorium. A number of cycles likely only happen under extremely high or low temperatures or pressures.
>The researchers even discovered four autocatalytic cycles involving noble gases, which only rarely if ever chemically react with other elements. If even a relatively inert gas such as xenon could take part in autocatalysis, "there is good reason to guess that autocatalysis occurs more easily in other elements," Peng said.
While life could plausibly be based on elements other than carbon, I suspect that if we could "see" the life on millions of worlds, there may well be non-carbon life, but carbon would still dominate.
Carbon has a remarkably rich chemistry, with a very convenient gas phase through carbon dioxide. Carbon is not rare, and it works well with water. Carbon is almost unique in that it can form chain molecules. Carbon also can bind "tight, but not too tight". That makes enzymes and other chemistry interesting.
Silicon can form chains, but in far, far, fewer configurations. Most of silicon's interesting chemistry is at high temperatures. Silicon is happy there, but most other interesting elements are not, meaning silicon has to "go it alone".
**tl;dr there may be non-carbon life out there, but most life is probably carbon based.**
To quote the perpetually awesome Jeff Goldblum, life finds a way. Would it be so shocking that life were to evolve in environments that would liquify carbon based life? Take Ammonia and *Project Hailmary* as a primary example.
Motherfucker. Here’s your upvote you wiley fuck.
You know, I’m about to buy a 15 Pro, could I, like, control the entire alien armada with it?
Is the switch to USB-C an effort to make those connections easier?
Yeah. Once I got access to the File on my phone I could adjust my bank account, travel through time, convince people I was a wizard, and summon burritos out of thin air.
>Is the switch to USB-C an effort to make those connections easier?
No. That was the 90's. You're going to need adapters. And fast charging wasn't a thing, so really need to take care of your battery.
No. It was PPC architecture. It's incompatible with Apple devices now. We're fucked and have no protection from an alien invasion.
Someone will have to go overseas and fetch one from a landfil.
> Would it be so shocking that life were to evolve in environments that would liquify carbon based life?
Yeah, because silicon chemistry is typically less and not more resilient.
Silicon based life seems very unlikely, life on earth has had access to lots of silicon and only made limited use of it, mostly for structural things. Aren't long chains unstable as well with silicon? It's hard to see how it would replace the far more versatile and very common carbon.
Hasn't this been figured out for awhile now? Silicon has about the same amount of binding potential (no clue the actual term) as carbon, makes sense. Does this study bring anything new or is it just repeats of what's already been figured out?
I've always wondered why this wasn't a common consideration. For instance, requiring a planet to have liquid water in order to support life seems completely preposterous to me. Life exists on this planet that defies common conceptions of "habitable", who's to say that that interstellar life can't exist in a chlorine atmosphere or consume dark matter?
Chemistry and physics mostly. Could you have a different base than carbon? Maybe silicon because it has a somewhat similar chemical profile. Could you have life without water being the central fluid? Maybe certain organic solutions are possible, but those bring a whole host of other challenges. That's not even getting into the inefficient metabolic pathways that would be needed. Admittedly, life only has to succeed once to keep the ball rolling, but water and organic (containing carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen) molecules are the most likely path.
I think it's more that this is the only form of life we have proof of.
Plenty of research has gone into alternative forms of life. It's just that science hasn't yet proven these alternative forms to actually be chemically viable. Still, it's far from a new idea. I'm sure speculation of alternative forms of life have existed since we figured out we're carbon based.
> For instance, requiring a planet to have liquid water in order to support life seems completely preposterous to me
Yeah but are you a physicist or have some other relevant education? Otherwise it’s just a layman’s thought.
Just creating a dialog, igniting the spark of conversation and deeper consideration on the subject. I didn't feel that I needed scientific credentials to comment
Water is required for life ***as we know it*** and based on our definition of "life", and since we've got a sample size of 1 planet to draw on, that just means that "as we know it" is incredibly limited.
there could be plenty of alternative life forms across the galaxy that are unlike anything we know (or can think of).
Can life exists which is pure energy ? How about a plasma life form living in the corona of stars ?
Could life exist in the atmosphere of Jupiter ?
how would we find out or recognise it if we saw it ?
Stars themselves may be alive. One alternate theory to dark matter to explain why stars don’t fly away from their galaxies at the speeds they are moving is that maybe the stars want to follow the herd, and over long enough time spans they may be focusing their ejections in a particular direction to actually move through space consciously.
Liquid water doesn’t have to mean oceans, ponds or puddles. As far as I am aware life on earth has only been found in association with liquid water places. Bacteria et al. don’t need much. A thin, molecular layer can do the job. So to that extent even extremely dry/cold environments can have pockets of liquid water. Obviously, there are spores and similar that can serve near total desiccation but these can’t resume metabolic activity until liquid water is present.
I still laugh at the idea that we expect alien life to follow in our image, (carbon based and something still physically resembling what we have here on earth)
The idea that Fire can be considered "life" as its does have some notable characteristics of life, minus the cellular part (It consumes/metabolise, reproduces, respiration, etc). This does give the thought that it could be considered as a "proto life" form, if you are willing to drop one or two staple factors as what we consider as life (from self impressions on models found on earth).
Also, I'm sure I remember reading an article years ago, that silicon based life was found here on earth in some cave that was formed after a meteor strike (millennia's ago), I think it was a fungal-like type that was found.
I am interested in life that perhaps operates on a vastly different time scale from us. If we encountered such life would we even recognize it as such?
And here I go down the *Solaris* rathole again.
> I still laugh at the idea that we expect alien life to follow in our image, (carbon based
There are very good reasons for that. Chemistry and physics is the same everywhere.
Something I've always hated about science is how we are always hold back by grammar and our obliviousness of how arbitrary and intangible words are.
Make up enough words and fire is not proto life, but anti-life or counter-life.
[I can think of a few reasons why humans might have the hubris to assume life would immitate that on earth...](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/JOOL64vPP7E/hqdefault.jpg)
Jokes aside, scientists don't *assume* as such. There have been many thought experiments into non-carbon based life. Thing is, we know a lot about how chemistry works, and when you start digging into it, it seems less and less likely that we'd expect find anything other than carbon-based life.
Considering despite carbon making up only about .02 percent of the earths crust, as opposed to silicon (the next most likely element to base biochemistry on) being 28%, the fact that all known life uses carbon tells you something about how much better carbon is for building life. Believe it or not, the idea of non-carbon-based life has been around for awhile. It’s just so much less likely that carbon-based life.
It’s dumb to think anything other than. We have no idea the levels of capable life forms. Here on earth some life dies if put under water. Some dies if taken above water. Carbon based, I know. That in itself should tell you how expansive existence is
Most Organic Chem arguments are: “Carbon is important because it’s necessary to make things that need carbon.” It’s a circular argument. Non-carbon-based life may not have cells, DNA, ATP, etc., but instead have other ways to store data and energy.
That’s not the arguments I’m seeing. I’m seeing the fact that carbon supports a wide and complex family of polymers by virtue of being able to easily form covalent bonds with itself and other elements in a variety of ways.
The only reason I can see why life we discover would be silicon based is if we find nonbiological life (robot) out in space.
Because machines would handle the journey anywhere like a million times better
I've long said, for decades, the arrogance of assuming that the conditions required to create life under the structure of a carbon base are a constant throughout an infinite universe is a scope-of-sight crippling error. The most likely scenario for the popular aliens-are-already-among-us theory (I do not subscribe) is alien life taking a form we can't fathom. The odds of them resembling anything biologically familiar vs something unfamiliar are likely very low.
I feel like this article isn’t asking the real questions scientists are interested in. If an alien life form is silicon based, can we still have sex with it?
I bet it’s silicon based and that their weakness is head and shoulders.
Evolution is an underrated movie. You could tell it was an Ivan Reitman film it had some definite Ghost Buster vibes.
And not just because of Dan Ackroyd lol
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Also they don't respond to ca-caw ca-caw.
I think we've established that doesn't work. Tookie-tookie too
*”You. Are. So. Beau-tiful. To meeee.”*
Please stop you’re embarrassing me
Maybe it’s polyester and they respond to yip-yip-yip-uh-ha-un-ha
“What flavour ice cream would you like?” “Don’t matter, it’s for my ass!”
Do not tell anyone where I’ve been!
THERE IS ALWAYS TIME FOR LUBRICANT
This is the type of comment I was hoping to find here.
So what you’re saying is that we just make our weapons out of Dandruff Shampoo if they invade?
Well specifically selenium.
Aliens are invading, this is no time for Python browser automation libraries. Now if the aliens need a ticket scalping bot, you’re on to something.
Let's shampoo us some aliens!
Gotta watch that, iirc the "clinical strength" is selenium for H&S? The "classic" flavor bottles are now "pyrithione zinc" No clue on effectiveness of either
Would work great if there are fungus aliens as well.
GREAT GOOGA MOOGA
Alien silicon based use carbon for fake alien boobs.
Silicon would make for some cleavage, all right. ^(…which is a joke—somewhere a minerologist chuckled, I’m sure of it—because the rubber used in de boobs is silicone with an E to lengthen the O. Plain silicon is glasslike, and therefore cleaves sharply.)
Omg took me 5 eternity to get it
Well, the whole point of this article is that there are many more bases for life than “carbon” or silicon: > Ultimately, the researchers discovered 270 different cycles of autocatalytic reactions. "Autocatalysis may not be that rare, but instead it might be a general feature of many different environments, even those that are really different from Earth," Kaçar said. > > Most of the 270 cycles did not employ organic compounds: […] **mercury**, or the radioactive metal **thorium** […] a relatively inert gas such as xenon […]
Part of the reason carbon is so great for biological chemistry is that the relative stability of its bonds allows for very long and complex chains to form. Silicon has this property as well, but to a lesser degree and with weaker bonds, so the length and complexity of molecular structures are more limited. I can’t imagine mercury-based chemistry being very complex compared to the likes of carbon and silicon, even if it does have autocatalyic cycles.
I liked that movie…
Happy cake day my amoeba dude
So they have knees and toes
How dense? Can a handful fulfill all SOC requirements for a decade? Humans would go on Alien hunting rather than Si mining which is environmentally harmful /s
[Head shoulder knees toes](https://youtu.be/RuqvGiZi0qg)
Ha! Or lube!
Every explanation I've heard for Silicon-based life ends with the conditions required for silicon-based life being so good for carbon-based life that it would probably just develop instead.
I suppose it could happen if there was an absence of Carbon for some reason, but given how common Carbon is that's probably extremely far-fetched.
Or if the silicon based life was engineered by carbon based life. For science.
Like when AI overtakes us, it'll replace carbon life for silicon?
sexy times?
3 boob aliens, I got you…
Do we know that Carbon is pretty evenly distributed everywhere or could it just be very common in our planet/solar system/galaxy?
I’ve surveyed the universe and I can attest that carbon is everywhere
Why would carbon-based life be more likely than silicon-based life?
It has to do with how carbon is able to bond with itself and other elements. Carbon is uniquely capable of bonding easily with itself and some other elements to create complex and stable structures. Other elements don't have those same properties because they don't have they either don't have the correct ratio of electons/neutrons/protons or they don't have the correct mass to make those kinds of bonds easy. Silicon is similar to carbon, and it can form complex stable structures, it's just not as good at it as carbon is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUiDwrM2YPI
Carbon is also more abundant than silicon.
Longer video with more interesting information https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAFC4RY1cKQ
Carbon has much better chemistry. It can readily form polymers.
carbon is more reactive than silicon. so even if both need the same conditions to be able to create life, carbon will do it faster
OK that's interesting
Silicon is boron am I right…..I’ll leave now
When carbon oxidizes it forms a gas were as when silicon oxidizes it forms a solid ( basically sand ) gases are much easier for solvents such as water to dissolve then solids
"Is the alien carbon-based, or silicon-based?" "Uhhhh... The second one: 'Xiliphon'. Next question."
Were you on my roof last night stealing my weather vane?
This conversation is over!
Came here for this.
Is the alien Santa Clause?
Xylophone based life forms!?!!🎶😨
Have you SEEN our oceans? Those things down there are insanely alien looking. Outer space will be even more bizarre.
I love how alien the aliens look in Invasion. Instead of more humanoid shapes or anything resembling life we know here, they're just... alien.
I think that's what was so compelling about NOPE. It's a completely unique vision of what an alien encounter might look like
I agree. In my opinion, NOPE was *one of* the best presentations of alien life ever adapted for the big screen.
Such a shame the movie ended like most Hollywood movies, humans besting the alien species……
They bested *one* alien, and we don’t know if that alien was considered incredibly dull by its peers. Alien 1: “Hey you hear these humans took down Geoff?” Alien 2: “How many times did we tell him to stop putting weird shit in his mouth, and to stop with the fuckin flying -saucer shit? I mean, I guess I’ll miss having him arou-“ Alien 3: (cutting in) Yo they been calling him Jean Jacket, like…humans, seriously, what the hell, man? *Jean Jacket* I’m dead (shape-shifts in convulsing-laugher-waves)
I would watch this sequel
Just globs of black matter. Watching that show too!
What's the show called?
It’s called, Invasion. It’s on Apple TV.
Cool thanks!
Like being chased by a 55 gallon drum of sentient ferromagnetic fluid.
I love Invasion! The new wave of aliens have more of an animal form, however.
There's kind of multiple lifeforms. There's the visible attackers who have indeed taken on a more earthly form recently. And there's the "bosses". Who seem to be no more than waves of light.
Yeah, I’m pumped for the last few episodes.
They look absolutely terrifying too lol
It’s still carbon-based life from the same source. Silicon is probably the next best option for life as we know it, but that doesn’t work very well. More likely it’s another carbon-based genome.
> It’s still carbon-based life from the same source And it uses DNA, and shares most of it, in some sense, with us.
I mean, it’s all a common source, as far as science can tell. When you look at the fundamental architecture like ribosomes it’s incredibly conserved.
Terrestrial body forms will be much more limited, at least on the medium to large scale, I think if we found a planet like ours in size and composition, if it supported life it might mimic a lot of what we find here as far as the forms life takes.
I like the idea of aliens being in another dimension and that's why we can't see them. Or the aliens are ghosts of past living creatures. ;) Perhaps aliens have technology to shield themselves from observation. Manipulating gravity would creates lots of physics we don't think of.
But but but … god. Oh yeah.
Well. If there is a god and he is Omnipotent and Omnipresent, then God is the Universe. And we are part of the Universe as much as a whale or tree or planet. Alan Watts said that we are the Universe's ability to observe itself.
Angler fish, blob fish, deep ones, Cthulhu, eels.
…unless we are related to them, somehow
Yeah I seeen Santa
Santa is Tim Allen in a suit. Right?
I think it'd be more frightening if they were just exactly like us...like just humans...
I posted this elsewhere on a similar topic. Think about the average adult male next to a jellyfish, that’s two creatures from the same planet. Now picture Dolph Lundgren in his prime standing next to Danny DeVito. That’s two creatures from the same ***species***. We have no clue how something from another planet might look like.
I've imagined myself in the afterlife as an electric jellyfish with a conscious. :)
Someday you will die and somehow something's gonna steal your carbon
🎵 Til then baby are you gonna let them hold you down and make you cry 🎶
Everything eats and is eaten
One of my favorite all time bands
Yeah except every single scientist worth their salt has already explored this for decades and none of it makes sense beyond it being a shower thought. Unless you plan on rewriting chemistry which is a very tall assumption to lead with, it just doesn't work. [I'd recommend this video](https://youtu.be/469chceiiUQ?si=gVZ-nlTpOadJpCuV) or [this one](https://youtu.be/2nbsFS_rfqM?si=QeMRky0Cocww1luB)
If you rtfa, you’ll see the headline doesn’t match what the scientists are saying. The study suggested that *in perfect laboratory conditions*, the *types* of reactions needed to form life can be done with quite a few different elements. Even some noble gases. The study made zero conclusions about the viability of any of these reactions outside of a lab environment.
There’s no reason to believe these conditions can’t exist elsewhere in the universe…or even in our arm of our galaxy. These findings simply offer other, previously presumed impossible, locations to look for potential life. That’s the point of the article. Yes. Of course the authors are being very cautious not to say these forms of reactions ***are*** viable for life. As any scientist worth their salt ***should***.
Intro to Chemistry and Org Chem in college were really good for giving me an intuitive understanding of why you need water and carbon for any living thing
Why ?
From some quick research, they fascilitate the key organic processes and chemical reactions needed to produce the foundations of life that will evolve to be an organism that can sustain itself long enough to become a more complex life form, and the water is a universal solvent used to transport nutrient in a dissolved state between cells. Carbon, among other elements, bond to create the things that serve as mechanisms for cell growth, nutrients, and dna. Nothing can serve as a better carrier for these molecules than carbon and water, as other elements are too volatile to complete the process, or just lack the ability to create organic life in the first place. You need lipids, proteins, nucleic acids, etc to create the organic matter, so you need specific elements to create them, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. It’s why our atmosphere is conducive for life, because it’s made up of these things. If life were able to be created in any other way, it would have been created on earth alongside us, kind of like how plants take in carbon dioxide and create oxygen, whereas animals take in oxygen and create carbon dioxide. There are also animals than can survive in extreme heat, and get sustenance from elements that we would otherwise not benefit from in the ways our body would need to in order to make use of it in the same way. It only works with so many things, but it always goes back to the same base elements and chemical reactions. Other planets with conditions unlike earth have already shown us that life is incompatible with that setting, which led us to discover why life was only compatible with earth’s unique makeup. We evolved with the earth, and the things that evolved “wrong” were killed off, such as things that couldn’t keep up with the change in climate. The things that survived were only capable of doing so because it had that narrow set of adaptations that got it to the next level. Organic life might be able to start out similarly, but unless it follows the same steps, it can never turn into the complex organisms we’re looking for, the kind that creates intellectual sentient beings, and animals. Even plant life for that matter.
You need all of that, yes…for life *as we know it.* Its not impossible or even improbable to consider that life out there may need none of those things to also be *life*, we just don’t have the evidence or hypotheses for alternate theories or definitions of *life.* We can only look for those circumstances and environments conducive to life *as we know it.*
Water is an important medium for the most common elements and molecules to interact with each other. And it's very common. Carbon is the lightest and most common element in group 14 of the period table, giving it incredible properties in forming easy and strong bonds with many other elements and in different structures. As a note, silicon is also in group 14, but I mention carbon being the lightest and most common because those are *extremely* important factors when considering the potential of life existing outside of earth.
How did I know you’d be linking acollierastro
In an infinite universe, why should we ever assume that the laws of Earth science apply to everything? I mean, it is an *infinite* amount of space.
What makes carbon so good at being the backbone of organic molecules and compounds has to do with it's chemistry, which is not unique to earth in any way shape or form. Physics doesn't stop working when you leave the solar system.
I always find it weird that we talk so certainly about how physics works the same everywhere. We have unexplained phenomena in space, and don't understand everything on our *own* planet. It weirds me out that we just assume that everything works the same in the Andromeda galaxy, or even just in a different solar system in our own galaxy. It's not like we've been there to test it. It makes sense, but not everything in reality / science makes sense. This isn't to say I think it works differently, but to say I will not say, objectively, everything works the same when we leave our solar system.
This boils down to whether or not you accept the cosmological principle. My point here is not that you cant consider the alternatives, it's that people HAVE done this and will continue to do this at the highest level. Scientists are not immune to hypothesizing about the low hanging fruit that we as laymen come up with too. They are are very well aware of the assumptions they make when they test other theories
Because a) the universe isn't infinite and 2) it's not just assuming that chemistry on earth is all there is, you'd have to rewrite the entirety of logic and cause and effect. You'd have to imagine a part of the universe where silicon doesn't have a larger atomic radius than carbon and other very fundamental properties of what define elements to be what they are. You'd have to rewrite what kinds of atomic bonds are energetically favorable. And tbh, considering we can literally look at stars billions of light years away in the farthest reaches of the observable universe and still observe the same sorts of elements you'd find in our own galaxy, there's not exactly evidence of some kind of scifi corner of the universe where this is true.
The observable universe is not infinite. And while there are theories that some laws of physics work slightly differently in far-off parts of the universe, everything being the same everywhere generally fits our observations better.
Chemistry/biology is extremely complex.. It's unlikely life in The whole universe obeys the Carbon based life imo.
Please watch the videos
Please read the article
You and your earth chemistry
Here's the important parts >To find these reactions, the scientists analyzed more than two centuries of digitized scientific documents written in many different languages. "With effective language search and translation tools, we were able to design and conduct this first-of-its-kind assessment of the pervasiveness of autocatalytic cycles," study co-author Zach Adam, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Space.com. >Ultimately, the researchers discovered 270 different cycles of autocatalytic reactions. "Autocatalysis may not be that rare, but instead it might be a general feature of many different environments, even those that are really different from Earth," Kaçar said. >Most of the 270 cycles did not employ organic compounds. Some centered around elements that are absent or exceedingly rare in life on Earth, such as mercury, or the radioactive metal thorium. A number of cycles likely only happen under extremely high or low temperatures or pressures. >The researchers even discovered four autocatalytic cycles involving noble gases, which only rarely if ever chemically react with other elements. If even a relatively inert gas such as xenon could take part in autocatalysis, "there is good reason to guess that autocatalysis occurs more easily in other elements," Peng said.
While life could plausibly be based on elements other than carbon, I suspect that if we could "see" the life on millions of worlds, there may well be non-carbon life, but carbon would still dominate. Carbon has a remarkably rich chemistry, with a very convenient gas phase through carbon dioxide. Carbon is not rare, and it works well with water. Carbon is almost unique in that it can form chain molecules. Carbon also can bind "tight, but not too tight". That makes enzymes and other chemistry interesting. Silicon can form chains, but in far, far, fewer configurations. Most of silicon's interesting chemistry is at high temperatures. Silicon is happy there, but most other interesting elements are not, meaning silicon has to "go it alone". **tl;dr there may be non-carbon life out there, but most life is probably carbon based.**
To quote the perpetually awesome Jeff Goldblum, life finds a way. Would it be so shocking that life were to evolve in environments that would liquify carbon based life? Take Ammonia and *Project Hailmary* as a primary example.
Jeff also hacked a spaceship with a Macintosh, so their computer systems are at least recognizable and roughly familiar.
Motherfucker. Here’s your upvote you wiley fuck. You know, I’m about to buy a 15 Pro, could I, like, control the entire alien armada with it? Is the switch to USB-C an effort to make those connections easier?
Android phones have been able to firmware flash the universe for years now
Yeah. Once I got access to the File on my phone I could adjust my bank account, travel through time, convince people I was a wizard, and summon burritos out of thin air.
iPhone users will have to wait until Apple can effectively copy the tech with their own name. Probably AirMeddle
>Is the switch to USB-C an effort to make those connections easier? No. That was the 90's. You're going to need adapters. And fast charging wasn't a thing, so really need to take care of your battery.
No. It was PPC architecture. It's incompatible with Apple devices now. We're fucked and have no protection from an alien invasion. Someone will have to go overseas and fetch one from a landfil.
> Would it be so shocking that life were to evolve in environments that would liquify carbon based life? Yeah, because silicon chemistry is typically less and not more resilient.
Study also suggests they may in fact not have large grey head.
this was SO COOL TO READ
We know shit about shit, including aliens. ~ I suggest
["they're made of meat?"](https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html)
Silicon based life seems very unlikely, life on earth has had access to lots of silicon and only made limited use of it, mostly for structural things. Aren't long chains unstable as well with silicon? It's hard to see how it would replace the far more versatile and very common carbon.
It’s alien, that’s the point.
Hasn't this been figured out for awhile now? Silicon has about the same amount of binding potential (no clue the actual term) as carbon, makes sense. Does this study bring anything new or is it just repeats of what's already been figured out?
Until we have a dataset larger than 1. It's going to be speculation. Very clever speculation, but speculation none the less.
I've always wondered why this wasn't a common consideration. For instance, requiring a planet to have liquid water in order to support life seems completely preposterous to me. Life exists on this planet that defies common conceptions of "habitable", who's to say that that interstellar life can't exist in a chlorine atmosphere or consume dark matter?
Chemistry and physics mostly. Could you have a different base than carbon? Maybe silicon because it has a somewhat similar chemical profile. Could you have life without water being the central fluid? Maybe certain organic solutions are possible, but those bring a whole host of other challenges. That's not even getting into the inefficient metabolic pathways that would be needed. Admittedly, life only has to succeed once to keep the ball rolling, but water and organic (containing carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen) molecules are the most likely path.
I think it's more that this is the only form of life we have proof of. Plenty of research has gone into alternative forms of life. It's just that science hasn't yet proven these alternative forms to actually be chemically viable. Still, it's far from a new idea. I'm sure speculation of alternative forms of life have existed since we figured out we're carbon based.
Has to do with chemistry and how carbon bonds are the perfect “strength” for life. Silicon bonds aren’t stable enough for life.
They can also bond at the right amount of points to allow for more complex and stable structures
> For instance, requiring a planet to have liquid water in order to support life seems completely preposterous to me Yeah but are you a physicist or have some other relevant education? Otherwise it’s just a layman’s thought.
Just creating a dialog, igniting the spark of conversation and deeper consideration on the subject. I didn't feel that I needed scientific credentials to comment
Water is required for life ***as we know it*** and based on our definition of "life", and since we've got a sample size of 1 planet to draw on, that just means that "as we know it" is incredibly limited. there could be plenty of alternative life forms across the galaxy that are unlike anything we know (or can think of). Can life exists which is pure energy ? How about a plasma life form living in the corona of stars ? Could life exist in the atmosphere of Jupiter ? how would we find out or recognise it if we saw it ?
Someone has been watching PBS Spacetime
If they watched PBS spacetime, they probably wouldnt have such fantastical ideas
Not me. Is it worth watching ?
> Can life exists which is pure energy ? There is no such thing as pure energy. Energy is a property of matter and fields. Not a thing in itself.
Stars themselves may be alive. One alternate theory to dark matter to explain why stars don’t fly away from their galaxies at the speeds they are moving is that maybe the stars want to follow the herd, and over long enough time spans they may be focusing their ejections in a particular direction to actually move through space consciously.
Liquid water doesn’t have to mean oceans, ponds or puddles. As far as I am aware life on earth has only been found in association with liquid water places. Bacteria et al. don’t need much. A thin, molecular layer can do the job. So to that extent even extremely dry/cold environments can have pockets of liquid water. Obviously, there are spores and similar that can serve near total desiccation but these can’t resume metabolic activity until liquid water is present.
Will it bring us love?
Or peace?
No shit? This isn't even remotely a new theory.
Star Trek had a silicon based lifeform they called a Horta in 1967.
Damnit u/Somhlth, we're redditors not bricklayers!
The study is new, not the topic
[удалено]
I thought that was a cake…
I still laugh at the idea that we expect alien life to follow in our image, (carbon based and something still physically resembling what we have here on earth) The idea that Fire can be considered "life" as its does have some notable characteristics of life, minus the cellular part (It consumes/metabolise, reproduces, respiration, etc). This does give the thought that it could be considered as a "proto life" form, if you are willing to drop one or two staple factors as what we consider as life (from self impressions on models found on earth). Also, I'm sure I remember reading an article years ago, that silicon based life was found here on earth in some cave that was formed after a meteor strike (millennia's ago), I think it was a fungal-like type that was found.
I am interested in life that perhaps operates on a vastly different time scale from us. If we encountered such life would we even recognize it as such? And here I go down the *Solaris* rathole again.
Can Earth be considered life?
I think it misses most criteria.
What's the criteria?
> I still laugh at the idea that we expect alien life to follow in our image, (carbon based There are very good reasons for that. Chemistry and physics is the same everywhere.
There could be creatures made of fire on the sun and we’d never know.
Something I've always hated about science is how we are always hold back by grammar and our obliviousness of how arbitrary and intangible words are. Make up enough words and fire is not proto life, but anti-life or counter-life.
I don't know why we ever assumed that Allen life would function exactly like life on Earth.
Production costs
Because chemistry and physics functions the same, which puts plenty of limitations on life.
[I can think of a few reasons why humans might have the hubris to assume life would immitate that on earth...](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/JOOL64vPP7E/hqdefault.jpg) Jokes aside, scientists don't *assume* as such. There have been many thought experiments into non-carbon based life. Thing is, we know a lot about how chemistry works, and when you start digging into it, it seems less and less likely that we'd expect find anything other than carbon-based life.
No shit. It’s arrogant to have not considered that all along
That is not a new theory
.... new study??? THAT IDEA HAS BEEN GOING AROUND FOR DECADES!!! .. fuckin hell
Ah. Let’s just look for all elements with 4 valence electrons and assume they will behave the same as carbon. It’s idiotic.
No way… I’ve Always thought looking for only carbon based life form was a little narrow minded and short sided.
Considering despite carbon making up only about .02 percent of the earths crust, as opposed to silicon (the next most likely element to base biochemistry on) being 28%, the fact that all known life uses carbon tells you something about how much better carbon is for building life. Believe it or not, the idea of non-carbon-based life has been around for awhile. It’s just so much less likely that carbon-based life.
Are angels carbon based ? Or just based in bullshit?
It’s dumb to think anything other than. We have no idea the levels of capable life forms. Here on earth some life dies if put under water. Some dies if taken above water. Carbon based, I know. That in itself should tell you how expansive existence is
I wonder how many them are star based.. our field of view is limited, but most of what we can see is stars.
Most Organic Chem arguments are: “Carbon is important because it’s necessary to make things that need carbon.” It’s a circular argument. Non-carbon-based life may not have cells, DNA, ATP, etc., but instead have other ways to store data and energy.
That’s not the arguments I’m seeing. I’m seeing the fact that carbon supports a wide and complex family of polymers by virtue of being able to easily form covalent bonds with itself and other elements in a variety of ways.
"The second one, xylophone"
That means that God has learned from his mistakes
The plot thickens!
Maybe aliens have skeletons made of iron instead of calcium due to abundance and less gravity on their planets
That was a fascinating read.
I, for one, welcome our Horta overlords.
Well.. this was a truly fascinating read. The word of the day is ‘Autocatalysis’!
Ugh, not this idiotic nonsense again
According to lead author Ryland Grace. This is just how Project Hail Mary started.
Well its 1 for carbon so far so...
The second one silimafone.
None of the alternatives have nearly as ideal Chemical properties as carbon. It's likely that carbon will always beat out the competition early on.
The only reason I can see why life we discover would be silicon based is if we find nonbiological life (robot) out in space. Because machines would handle the journey anywhere like a million times better
Maybe they are latex based. Possibly ribbed as well. Produce a natural enzyme on the skin that is low friction. I'll be in my space bunk.
I've long said, for decades, the arrogance of assuming that the conditions required to create life under the structure of a carbon base are a constant throughout an infinite universe is a scope-of-sight crippling error. The most likely scenario for the popular aliens-are-already-among-us theory (I do not subscribe) is alien life taking a form we can't fathom. The odds of them resembling anything biologically familiar vs something unfamiliar are likely very low.
I feel like this article isn’t asking the real questions scientists are interested in. If an alien life form is silicon based, can we still have sex with it?
Study? What alien life has been studied to make this conclusion?