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NASA Finds New Life (This Afternoon)

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the truth-is-inside-that dept.

While the official 2pm conference should have more answers, most of the internet has decided that NASA has discovered a completely new life form based on arsenic instead of the more traditional organic materials. We'll know more in a few hours.

4 of 405 comments (clear)

  1. Can we finally, finally, finally by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Stop arguing that life on earth is a special, special snowflake, created by a God who looks just like us? If a deity exists, clearly they are just as likely to be made of arsenic.

    1. Re:Can we finally, finally, finally by ChromaticDragon · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Now, now...

      Galactic suburbia isn't quite so bad. Nice and stable. Helps to keep those planetary orbits from changing too much or too quickly. I mean a good wallop a long time ago to create the moon is all well and good. But after a while you just want to settle down. We really don't to get pelted with comets and planetoids all that often.

      Things are a lot tougher closer to the core. It's simply much to busy. Nearby stars bustling together. Everybody taking these whiplash commutes around the central black hole. Pesky neighboring stars who keep perturbing your Oort cloud sending debris down on you regularly. Many young stars just cannot handle it. Oh they seem successful; the get nice and big. But they just explode. And let me tell you, you just don't want to live where you could get shot up every few million years or so.

  2. Re:Why not wait ? by pedantic+bore · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why not wait until 2pm before posting the article then ?

    Anyone can comment on facts, but conjecture is more fun.

    --
    Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
  3. Re:Still carbon-based by tgd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There's nothing to see here if it can be shown that there is a sequence of changes that can go directly from point A to point B (A being "life" -- without a firm definition, but "life" using phosphorus, and B being identical "life" using arsenic instead) where every step of the path between forms a viable chemistry that continues to be "life".

    If you can't do that, then there's pretty significant reason to think that along with the handful of times life likely arose on Earth with a chemistry that *can* be linked that way to now, it arose a time using a completely different chemistry.

    That latter would mean two VERY important things -- the conditions that life could arise in is a lot broader than we believe AND, if its got similar genetics and use of amino acids, that the opportunistic use of amino acids (which are known to be extremely common in space) isn't a rare thing.

    This are staggering, dicipline-changing insights unless someone can show a path from A-B.