At this point, there's really no reason to believe that there will be a lot of life out in the universe that isn't carbon based. Carbon just bonds with everything so much more easily than anything else we know of thus far. According to Neil deGrasse Tyson, "Carbon is the slut of the periodic table."
In 'our kind of Goldilocks Zone', with 'our kind of base chemical mix'. I reckon the first life we actually meet (maybe not detect[1]), and maybe even
have inadvertently met[2], will occupy a currently unknown
other stable point in the "equation of life"'s multidimensional surface.
It's not totally out there to suggest that Silicon (under pressures and at temperatures applicable to it behaving as such) might produce an substitute 'organic' chemistry to roughly parallel our Carbon-based system, although I'm not sure what the Universal Solvent of that environment will be, because it won't be water. Actually, I'm betting that what we'll eventually find will be
much more different. It'll all depend under what circumstances the applicable abiogenesis occurs, but any 'successful' happenstance of that kind will be continue to be self-organising. (Because any that isn't, I have already discounted as "not successful". Really, I can afford to 'cheat' with that logic loop, because potential abiogenetic experiments are spontaneously going on all
over the place[3].) Oh, if there's
already a (different) viable form of 'life' in the immediate vicinity, the fledgling 'new paradigm' might get swamped, and there's always natural disasters of whatever kind, especially a threat for particularly lethargic self-organisers.
But I wouldn't be surprised to find out that our nearest living neighbours would find
our chemistry extraordinary. They'd never have
thought that on a planet as cool and H
2O-sodden as ours that any self-organising molecule could ever arise! It was only the strange seasonal variations in green land-cover which led them to believe that the native global organism was chlorophyll-based[4], and eventually they landed their probes and after a few....
misuinderstandings... realised that the intellectually dominant life-form on the planet was actually dolphins/octopuses/
veliceraptors[5]/whatever... But they could at least deal with these strange Human things, too...
But what was the point again? Oh yeah, I was just trying to discourage too much of an anthropocentric POV.
[1] Because we'd be biased towards looking for planets of roughly Earth Mass orbiting at roughly 1AU around stars roughly like Sol, etc...
[2] Probably no-one knew, if we're significantly different. Possibly the same holds true on the
other side of the meeting.
[3] If you want me to limit "all over the place", I'd suggest wherever there's an 'edge' between two distinct mediums, for reasons I won't go into right now.
[4] An exotic complex of that their native scientific community had
occasionally developed in their low-pressure chemistry rigs, but which their engineering community was looking to replicate the functionality of in more 'room temperature'-friendly compounds in order to better power their Smartphones.... (That description to be read in terms of an Alien 'standard' of temperature, pressure, etc.)
[5] They featured in the
first survey, but by the time they got together a 'manned'/Aliened expedition, they'd died out and been replaced.
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Topic: SCIENCE, Gravitational waves, and the whole LIGO OST! (Read 512973 times)