EnglishLady
Veteran Expediter
Watch out for the wookies 
http://news.yahoo.com/newfound-tatooine-alien-planet-bodes-well-e-t-154537390.html
http://news.yahoo.com/newfound-tatooine-alien-planet-bodes-well-e-t-154537390.html
'Tantooine' type planet found
- Thread starter EnglishLady
- Start date
What I find hilarious is the number of scientists who think life will only be discovered in an extrasoloar system on a planet that's within the Habitable Zone, and on a planet similar to Earth. More likely, life will be first discovered in the most unexpected place, and will be in a thoroughly perplexing form, if it's even recognized as life at all.
A lot of scientists and authors have postulated different forms of life other than carbon, including Carl Sagan and Gene Roddenberry, but the prejudiced notion of water and carbon prevails. Actually, the term for it is carbon chauvinism. On this planet we have carbon based lifeforms which require water, but it's the only kind of life we know. There could be millions of different types of life. Granted, carbon is is abundant on earth and ubiquitous throughout the cosmos, and bonds easily with other elements, especially simple elements like oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen. Carbon is able to bond with all of these because of its four valence electrons that make bonding with other valence electrons quite easy.
Lifeforms on Earth use carbon for the basic structural and metabolic functions, water as a solvent, and DNA and RNA to define and control the form. But it's possible that undiscovered life-forms could exist that differ radically in their basic structures and biochemistry from that known to science. Sure, older stars naturally produce copious amounts of carbon, and its neighbors on the periodic table, oxygen and nitrogen, so it's abundant, and although other elements may form complex, covalently bonded structures, none has the rich molecular variety of carbon. That's why it's most likely that other lifeforms would be carbon based. However... we've found things on the Moon and Mars, on other planets and moons within out own solar system that have thoroughly surprised us. And that doesn't even take into consideration the life we've found on this planet were no life was thought to be able to exist, no way, no how. Whoops.
The hydrothermal vents of the Mariana Trench, in the acid-filled boiling sulfur liquid of mineral springs, the boiling Pitch Lake of Trinidad (similar to the La Brea Tar Pits, is a 95-acre lake of tar) where the lifeforms feed on hydrocarbon and breathe out metals. There are microbes living without oxygen or light in the Dry Valley of Antarctica. There are 13 species of bacteria which, it turns out, only live in the clean rooms of NASA, living off leftover paint and solvents. There is even a bacteria, the Deinococcus Radiodurans bacteria, that only lives in radioactive waste and within naturally occurring areas of high radiation. Humans are killed quite quickly with a radiation dose of 10 Grays, while these little suckers laugh at 15,000 Grays.
If something other than water, like acid for example, was the solvent, then DNA and RNA as we know it wouldn't likely exist as part of the life mechanism. It would be something else. If the chemistry were not carbon based, and were instead based on silicon, or boron, or sulfur, all elements similar to carbon in how they bond, could be the basis of life elsewhere. As well, metals like titanium, aluminum, magnesium and iron are all more abundant in the Earth's crust than is carbon, and any of these metals as metal-oxide based life could be a very real possibility under certain conditions, particularly those such as high temperatures, where carbon-based life would be unlikely.
Life as we know it may be exceedingly rare, but life itself may be all throughout the cosmos.
Lifeforms on Earth use carbon for the basic structural and metabolic functions, water as a solvent, and DNA and RNA to define and control the form. But it's possible that undiscovered life-forms could exist that differ radically in their basic structures and biochemistry from that known to science. Sure, older stars naturally produce copious amounts of carbon, and its neighbors on the periodic table, oxygen and nitrogen, so it's abundant, and although other elements may form complex, covalently bonded structures, none has the rich molecular variety of carbon. That's why it's most likely that other lifeforms would be carbon based. However... we've found things on the Moon and Mars, on other planets and moons within out own solar system that have thoroughly surprised us. And that doesn't even take into consideration the life we've found on this planet were no life was thought to be able to exist, no way, no how. Whoops.
The hydrothermal vents of the Mariana Trench, in the acid-filled boiling sulfur liquid of mineral springs, the boiling Pitch Lake of Trinidad (similar to the La Brea Tar Pits, is a 95-acre lake of tar) where the lifeforms feed on hydrocarbon and breathe out metals. There are microbes living without oxygen or light in the Dry Valley of Antarctica. There are 13 species of bacteria which, it turns out, only live in the clean rooms of NASA, living off leftover paint and solvents. There is even a bacteria, the Deinococcus Radiodurans bacteria, that only lives in radioactive waste and within naturally occurring areas of high radiation. Humans are killed quite quickly with a radiation dose of 10 Grays, while these little suckers laugh at 15,000 Grays.
If something other than water, like acid for example, was the solvent, then DNA and RNA as we know it wouldn't likely exist as part of the life mechanism. It would be something else. If the chemistry were not carbon based, and were instead based on silicon, or boron, or sulfur, all elements similar to carbon in how they bond, could be the basis of life elsewhere. As well, metals like titanium, aluminum, magnesium and iron are all more abundant in the Earth's crust than is carbon, and any of these metals as metal-oxide based life could be a very real possibility under certain conditions, particularly those such as high temperatures, where carbon-based life would be unlikely.
Life as we know it may be exceedingly rare, but life itself may be all throughout the cosmos.