I used to think scientists were being awfully carbon centric in their quest for life. There must be so many other ways for live to exist right? But once you take organic chemistry it seems so likely that other life would also be carbon based. Literally nothing else in the periodic table is as good as carbon for the flexibility that life benefits from so much. Silicon is a distant second.
While it is certainly not impossible that there are forms of non-carbon based life out there, they would have to be utterly dwarfed by the number of carbon based ones.
Our body of knowledge derives from intimate familiarity with an environment that is rare in the universe. The extremes here do not compare at all to cosmological extremes. It's not surprising that our chemistry is quite sophisticated and nuanced when the elements involved are abundant here and the temperatures involved are within a range easily achievable here and the gravity is more or less 1G and there is atmospheric pressure and the ambient magnetic field is inside a certain range and the time intervals involved are observable within a human attention span.
I think we make a mistake by universalizing our perspective, so to speak. We define life by what we see around us and then assert, correctly and unassailably, that life must be made of the chemistry that we ourselves are made of, without generally understanding that the definitions are circular.
I'm lost. Presumably chemistry would work the same everywhere. So we should be able to recreate or predict some environments that would yield the same magic as 1g, 70deg F, carbon-based life, but with other parameters. Yet the consensus seems to be that there are relatively few other parameter sets that would yield some alien equivalent of organic chemistry.
It is very difficult for us humans to really grasp that unknown unknowns are real and have an effect. On some level, we assume that if we don't know something, it's not worth knowing, or we confidently make things up not even realizing we have done so. This bias influences us to believe that we know far more than we actually do.
...we should be able to recreate or predict some environments that would yield the same magic...
Why should we? Physics and chemistry derive from observation. Theory is descriptive.
1) Our experience with chemistry outside of the Earth environment is almost entirely theoretical. Only very expensive equipment can achieve, for only fractions of a second, in only microliters volume, extremes of temperature, pressure, magnetic fields, and never any environment with higher gravity than our own. We have no experimental access to, not to mention actual intuitive understanding of, the widely diverse environments that exist in the Universe. So, our experimental knowledge is lacking.
2) Were we disembodied minds with no actual experience of the world, could we predict the existence of terrestrial life from first principles if given complete access to current knowledge of terrestrial physics and chemistry? Probably not. We don't know what makes a good environment for life, other than that we look around on Earth and see it everywhere. So, our theoretical knowledge is inadequate.
3) Even what we perceive and define as life, sentience or civilization is limited by our lack of experience. If trees for example had a rich storytelling tradition, epics unfolding over centuries perhaps, how would we even discover that or understand them? Trees are far more relatable than aliens are likely to be given that we share a common ancestor. The concept of, say, wind patterns or waves or nebulae being alive or sentient is easily dismissed, but again, our definition of life is narrowly defined by our single data point, our interests and outlook conferred and constrained by our evolution. Is it useful? Is it dangerous? This is the sort of thing that informs even our ability to perceive something as worthy of attention. Before microorganisms were discovered, the concept of invisible critters was laughable. So, our understanding of what we're looking for is inadequate. I suspect that the evidence of alien life is all around, but it's just too different even to be interesting.
One hypothesis could be that life of all forms is abundant in the universe. If true, then that implies that our form of life is at least duplicated somewhere. If we find our form (or close cousin), then we open the way for the larger generalization.
Silicon, germanium, titanium, and a few other elements can make structures as complex as carbon. But factor in relative abundances and solvating chemistry, and it starts looking very unlikely that life would evolve to be based on anything other than carbon.
This fast. But given enough time life could evolve using other things than carbon, carbon is just way faster than anything else and would likely crowd out other contenders. But if for some reason a place is very low on carbon there is a chance for other chemistries to dominate even if their pathways are much slower than the ones in a carbon based environment.
It used to be that the thinking was that this was simply unlikely to the point of being impossible but since 2017 there has been some change in attitude towards especially the possibility of silicon based life.
this is an artifact of the room-temperature-centric history of experimentation, not some universal truth
the humans live out their lives at 300°, absolute, using the kelvin scale. there's lots of interesting behavior in matter down to 4° or less, and some solids up past 4000°. going further, human science doesn't really have a good handle on what kinds of complex interactions can occur with alfvén waves and plasma currents; they don't even know what's going on with prominently (heh) observable phenomena on the surface of the sun or how to stabilize a tokamak. but to be conservative let's consider just the 4°–4000° temperature range where we have solids and liquids
from that temperature range, covering three orders of magnitude, carbon-chain molecules have interesting and complex behavior over the range 200°–500°, more or less. just a factor of 2.5. 13% of the temperature range. below 200° (-73°C) pretty much all organic chemicals crystallize and become brittle and nonliving, though there are a few boring exceptions like methane. above 500° (230°C) they are unstable, breaking apart into elemental carbon and methane, again with a very few exceptions like teflon. the temperature range over which carbon chains are practical to synthesize is smaller still
a chemist on titan (94° absolute) would consider implausible the suggestion that living cells could be made out of carbon-chain molecules dissolved in water, a material that doesn't even melt until hellish temperatures nearly three times the boiling point of methane. a chemist on venus (740° absolute) would consider implausible the suggestion that living cells could be made out of such absurdly unstable molecules as carbon-chain polymers — much less with amide groups, which she knows as violently reactive with ordinary everyday substances like red-hot sulfuric acid. moreover, she would consider the pressure on earth's surface (1% of atmospheric for a venusian) to be a good approximation to the vacuum of space, constantly exposed to sterilizing levels of ultraviolet from the sun
(venus and titan specifically are not covered in vegetation or presumably in chemists, but there are astronomical numbers of other planets with conditions like theirs, and as sagan's paper pointed out, antarctica isn't exactly a jungle either)
there are interesting things going on over the other 87% of the temperature range, too. at room temperature the humans mostly know phosphates as minerals that are unusually hard to melt, but phosphoric acid just starts to polymerize above about 500° absolute and stays liquid past 1000°, polymerizing more and more enthusiastically; some common phosphates remain solid past 2000°. neat silica becomes a useful solvent at temperatures a bit higher than that, and silicates of sodium or potassium can be liquid down to room temperature if plasticized with enough water; silica is nearly as abundant as carbon. ammonia is liquid from 195° to 240°, a narrower range than water (273° to 373°, which is a 3:4 ratio to ammonia's 4:5) but not ridiculously so, and shares many of water's interesting properties, and we already know many interesting substances that can be synthesized in an ammonia solution, including many that are not stable at room temperature (and therefore might be in a useful reactivity range in ammonia's liquid range). and there are 1.7 orders of magnitude of temperature below ammonia's freezing point before you get to liquid helium and the cosmic background radiation. most of the universe's volume is in that temperature range, though not most of its matter, and if dyson's 'future of life in an ever-expanding universe' is correct, those temperatures and below are where our descendants will spend the vast majority of history
but the humans really only know a tiny fraction of the possible complex molecules at those temperatures, because working with them in their laboratories is difficult, expensive, dangerous, and unprofitable; molecules that explode when you heat them up to room temperature, or solidify into refractory ceramics when cooled anywhere near it, will not yield useful drugs, elastomers, cheap injection-molding plastics, or fuels, so research into them has mostly been pure, not applied. the exceptions are mostly high-temperature ceramics research focused on finding the strongest and most refractory materials, not interesting synthesis pathways that can operate inside white-hot zirconia crucibles
but don't let the utterly disorderly behavior of, say, nitrogen chains at the melting point of water fool you into thinking their chemistry is trivial; most compounds that are stable at 10% of that temperature haven't been discovered yet
Extremophiles are real world examples of the kind of life that still has some commonality with the rest of us and yet they are already skirting the edges of what's possible and they thrive in what wouldn't even begin to qualify as livable circumstances for others.
They're not going to start a Venusian equivalent of the royal society but they are life and I think it is important to note the fact that life doesn't necessarily have to be intelligent or even multi-cellular to be just as real as we are. And the thresholds for 'life' are probably a lot lower than for 'intelligent life'.
i don't think you can go that far from room temperature with nucleic acids. one thing that casts doubt on my thesis here is that though luca clearly used nucleic acids, surely (?) life didn't start that way. but we haven't found even undersea-vent extremophile life with a silicone-based genome or any other alternative chemistry, even in ecological niches where there would be no competition from carbon-based life. so,
- i could be just wrong;
- abiogenesis might have originally produced carbon-based life and then been unable to escape the shackles of that heritage, even in places like the parts of undersea vents that are too hot for carbon-based extremophiles;
- implausibly, those places do contain non-carbon-based life that nobody has recognized yet; or,
- more provocatively, abiogenesis might have happened somewhere extraterrestrial (venus, mars, europa) and only infected earth after already getting quite close to luca
life on earth does seem to have taken a long time, most of the planet's lifetime in fact, to get to the point of sometimes being able to prove theorems
> we haven't found even undersea-vent extremophile life with a silicon[e!]-based genome
That may simply be because even there carbon has the advantage and would call anything else 'food', so on the timescales that we observe life silicon based life might simply not have time enough to evolve.
It's an interesting question, and if life really revolves around a single atom (Carbon) being present that would in itself be yet another one of those things that makes you wonder what the chances are of life existing at all.
Judging by our own evolutionary timetable it may be that on the 'hot' earth other life forms were possible but as things cooled down they were no longer viable (I'm assuming that 'hot' life would evolve faster and 'cold' life would evolve slower, this may well be a wrong assumption), and as earth cools down further it may well be that things that are not viable right now may become viable. Life seems to have very few pre-requisites, energy and some specific molecules present in non-zero quantities and you're off to the races.
Also: nucleic acids may not be a pre-requisite either: life may well require them for bootstrapping but they may not be a requirement for all forms of life.
i was thinking of silicones because silanes are unstable even at room temperature, let alone at undersea-vent temperatures, while silicones can be stable up to lava temperatures if you don't require them to be organic (the alkali silicates i mentioned upthread, which gradually shade into the kinds of organic-functionalized silane surfactants used to enable organics to bond to phyllosilicate functional fillers). maybe silanes, dissolved in liquid ammonia, could work at low temperatures, but i doubt it
my thought with the undersea vents is that, if there was a diverse hadean or archean ecosystem of non-carbon-based life, some of it should have survived in the parts of the vents that are too hot for carbon-based life. maybe the cells that froze to death in boiling water would become food for carbon-based extremophiles, but the cells in the hotter parts of the rock should be safe
but we don't observe that, and i think that the most likely explanation is that there wasn't any silicone-based life in the hadean
nucleic acids are definitely not a requirement for all forms of life
Such a great post on how people are blind to their blindspots - and even when trying to think critically still have trouble seeing the water they swim in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_ternary has some enjoyable advantages over more conventional number systems; numbers are a lot shorter than in binary, but arithmetic is nearly as easy, and it accommodates negative numbers naturally and inherently rather than through a length-dependent hack like twos' complement. under certain plausible assumptions about your available hardware, it has about a 5.7% device complexity advantage over binary (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_economy), though those assumptions often do not hold in practice
so i thought it would make a good example of path-dependent divergences: this alternative system is arguably better than binary, decimal, vigesimal, or sexagesimal, but not by enough to make it worth the incompatibility in the real world
an extraterrestrial society with a different history, and thus no need for compatibility with c, ascii, ttl, and synchronous-logic eda platforms, might have taken a different path
there could be life in the sun, but we haven't observed it
i was saying that we don't understand the plasma dynamics that drives the solar phenomena we do observe, not that they are driven by life, so plausibly such plasma dynamics could also drive life in the same way that chemistry drives life here on earth
What is life? What motivates structures to possess mobility and self determination and all the other definitions? When is a self sustaining process something more than a summary of recent physical interactions? There are many self organising systems why are some life and others not? Stars seem to broadly fit most definitions of life. Why are they not considered alive? What is the distinction between living and nonliving allowing our understanding of the universe?
Those are all really good questions, but at the end of the day they don't really matter and are a matter of semantics. You could similarly ask is there anything that isn't life. Is matter a prerequisite for life? What about voids in the matter of space that shift and change over time? Is empty space alive?
You could Define life broadly to include Stars or mountains, but then you just look for a new subset and name that would include life more similar to our own.
One definition of life that I think resists scrutiny is an object or unit which contains a transferable data and an algorithm to use that data. This would separate a cloud from a tree.
there's a sliding scale, a tiny basic interpreter doesn't explain the addition and subtraction algorithms it uses either, relying on the cpu hardware for that
So maybe to be alive you can't use any external interpretation. It pushes the threshold up, but basically all cellular life decoders it's own DNA. The environment is just materials and I formation. No decoding
you run into the reprap vitamin problem: is vitamin b12 'just materials' or is it 'decoding'? but afaik all cellular life encodes its own ribosome proteins in its dna or rna, rather than harvesting ribosomes from prey, so in that sense it encodes its own decoder
I think you could argue that b12, ect are just materials in the sense that the consumer is not providing inormation for its manufacture.
In this case where manufacturing instructions are transmitted, you could have a system where neither component is consider alive by itself, but the system is.
One cell with DNA only, and another with ribosomes only would not be considered alive. However, a multicellular combination of them would be alive.
Obligate parasites will be alive in some cases, and not in others, depending on how they handle stored data (DNA), and what they rely on the host to do.
I wonder if in other places (galaxies and planets), the atoms could behave differently thus creating other forms of life. But I have no idea if that makes any sense.
> The cosmological principle is usually stated formally as 'Viewed on a sufficiently large scale, the properties of the universe are the same for all observers.' This amounts to the strongly philosophical statement that the part of the universe which we can see is a fair sample, and that the same physical laws apply throughout. In essence, this in a sense says that the universe is knowable and is playing fair with scientists.
There is no evidence that the nature of the electron or carbon atom is different in different parts of the universe. This would be detectable (if it was) by shifts in the spectral lines for atoms or differences in ratios of elements.
The law of gravity appears to be consistent throughout the observable universe. The physics of atoms and ratios associated with nucleosythesis have been shown to be consistent.
The constants of physics appear to remain constant over billions of years ( https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap050220.html - " Oklo by-products are being used today to probe the stability of the fundamental constants over cosmological time-scales" )
How do we know that distant galaxies are composed of matter rather than anti-matter? If equal quantities of each were produced in the big bang, might not some parts of the universe contain primarily matter and other parts primarily anti-matter? - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-we-know-th...
Maybe one could speculate about a white dwarf star, cooled down to room temperature over astronomical eons, with some sort of life then evolving on its extremely magnetized surface. Its laws of chemistry would work differently.
Chemistry is somewhat environment- and temperature-dependent, but there's no other element that behaves like carbon in any known conditions.
Carbon's chemistry comes from three major factors:
(1) It forms four bonds readily.
(2) It can form double- and triple-bonds readily.
(3) It bonds strongly to itself in a configuration that allows it to form long chains.
(1) is satisfied by other elements in its column on the periodic table, but silicon (the next element down in its group) and the following members (germanium, tin, and lead) fail (2) and increasingly (3). Silicon will form chains, but is reluctant to form double bonds; in general, double bonds become weaker for atoms further down the table. Silicon (and silicone, chains of Si-O bonds) are the most promising analogs but they have a lot of problems.
(2) is satisfied by most other light nonmetals, but those nonmetals mostly fail (3) and almost all fail (1).
The highly-electronegative oxygen doesn't really want to bond with itself (failing 3) and almost always takes a -2 oxidation state (failing 1).
Nitrogen actually does form four-bond atoms decently often (most notably the ammonium ion), so it somewhat satisfies (1) to some extent, but is so eager to form N2 that most polynitrogen compounds are wildly unstable to the point that "nitro" is a term even laypeople know is associated with explosives (failing 3).
Boron can form three bonds, allowing some of the complexity of (1), and will form nice polyboron compounds (3), but doesn't like forming double bonds (failing 2), and the bonds in boranes are so weak that they're mostly quite reactive (weakening 3).
Sulfur will form polysulfur chains (the most common form is an eight-membered ring), but sulfur (like its cousin oxygen) usually doesn't form more than two bonds except with extremely electronegative partners (like its effective total bond order of 3 in sulfur dioxide or 4 in sulfur trioxide).
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There's another problem here too: life is likely to form out of common elements in its environment, and carbon is just WAY more common than the alternatives. The mechanisms by which the elements are formed in stars very strongly favors elements with even atomic numbers (because they are mostly formed from helium-4 nuclei) and the burning processes peak at carbon/oxygen, neon, magnesium, and silicon.
As a result, carbon is very common. It's the fourth most common element in the Universe (after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen), and ~an order of magnitude more common than any of the elements discussed above except oxygen (which has basically no analogs to carbon chemistry).
As I understood it, it would be perfectly possible to replicate most of the functionality of life (amino acids) by moving down one period in the periodic table. So that would be C->Si, N->P, P->As, etc (with or without O->S substitution [0]). You can't do the same by moving left or right in the periodic table because elements are grouped vertically by their electrochemical properties (electrovalence), so moving left or right gives you a material with wildly different properties.
The problem is that all of the molecules in period 3 are much more massive than their carbon-family counterparts, which means that the energy required to construct said building blocks must be equally higher. If we assume a high-entropy environment exists for these molecules to form, the first obvious question is then: how come carbon-based life didn't appear in that environment as well and outcompeted Si-based life? Would it have to be high-pressure environments like inside gas giant planets, or high-temperature environments on planets much closer to the star? And if the environment is inhospitable to carbon-based life, is there sufficient stability in that environment to produce more than just the functional building blocks of life?
Next, the question of development speed is an interesting one. Of course, evolution isn't linear so everything here is conjecture, but just as a thought experiment: How long would it take for such an environment (inhospitable to carbon-based life, but capable of spawning silicon-based life) to produce single-celled organisms, and then for those organisms to meaningfully alter their biosphere (like Earth's Great Oxidation Event) so that we can detect those changes through our telescopes? Earth is 4.5 billion years old; oxygen started appearing in the atmosphere 2 billion years ago, but didn't appear in meaningful quantities until less than 1 billion years ago. That 3.5 billion years from planet formation to detectable biosphere signature for carbon-based life (n=1, of course). If we take a wild guess that silicon-based life is slower to develop by a factor 2, we'd have to find planets that are at least 7 billion years old (and have been stable for that time). Given that the lower bound for the age of the entire universe is 8 billion years, we're getting close to planets that are as old as the universe itself. Add to that that our telescopes are also looking into the past, the further out we look -- but 100 million years (the Virgo supercluster) seems negligible compared to the supposed 7 billion years projected incubation time: It seems rather optimistic to expect silicon-based life signatures to readily appear on our telescopes.
While it is certainly not impossible that there are forms of non-carbon based life out there, they would have to be utterly dwarfed by the number of carbon based ones.