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Water Not a Good Enough Guide To Find Alien Life
An anonymous reader noted an article in Cosmos that questions the conventional wisdom of the "follow the water" strategy of seeking extraterrestrial life, saying "There's an awful lot of places where water could exist — either on the surface of the Earth, or deep within it — yet life is largely concentrated in a small sliver of this."
If life is just an evolved entity composed of randomly assembled machines, as some biologists claim, then it begs the question of wether or not there might be 'life' out there that is not water based, but based on say, sand -- or silicon.
It simple states that water can exists in environments that is hostile to life as we know it.
No shit, Sherlock.
Yeah, seriously. The "conventional wisdom" is not that water implies life, but rather that the absence of water implies the absence of life.
We search for water on other worlds not because we're sure that's where there will be life, but rather because it's the first, most basic indicator of the possibility of the only kind of life we know can exist.
Water alone is not sufficient? Duh! Nobody ever thought it was.
I do take issue with the idea that only 12% of the water on earth has life. AFAIK, a cup of water from any natural source in or in the ground has some sort of life in it.
Yeah, like the very first look we took 600 feet under the Anarctic ice sheet showed complex life. Sounds fishy. Or shrimpy as the case may be.
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Well I am not saying it is impossible. But water has a lot of really unique chemical properties that makes randomly evolving life more likely. Being that it devolves a lot of chemicals, as well as it is sticky could come in handy in making life processes, Oh lets get rid of those pieces and glue these together while their bonds are week they stick together for a while then split. While silicon my have a lot of life giving properties for it to occur naturally/randomly you would need some medium to try to create random combination. Otherwise Sand/Silicon will be quite happy in sand like state.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.