<story><title>A 1990 experiment to test whether we could discern life on Earth remotely</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03230-z</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jandrese</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;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.</text></item><item><author>kogus</author><text>I half expected this article to essentially say &amp;quot;we wouldn&amp;#x27;t know life if it hit us in the face&amp;quot;, but happily the conclusion was that yes, we could see strong evidence for the presence of life on earth from Galileo.&lt;p&gt;Life in other places might be radically different from our own, and we might be looking for the wrong things - but it is good to know that our search is at least able to find what we are looking for.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rendall</author><text>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&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;I think we make a mistake by &lt;i&gt;universalizing&lt;/i&gt; 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.</text></comment>
<story><title>A 1990 experiment to test whether we could discern life on Earth remotely</title><url>https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03230-z</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jandrese</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;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.</text></item><item><author>kogus</author><text>I half expected this article to essentially say &amp;quot;we wouldn&amp;#x27;t know life if it hit us in the face&amp;quot;, but happily the conclusion was that yes, we could see strong evidence for the presence of life on earth from Galileo.&lt;p&gt;Life in other places might be radically different from our own, and we might be looking for the wrong things - but it is good to know that our search is at least able to find what we are looking for.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>adastra22</author><text>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.</text></comment>