NASA Finds New Life (This Afternoon)

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.

Comments

It's the Shadow Biosphere Lake

[eldavojohn]

Mono Lake was mentioned back in 2009 and in March as potentially harboring this 'shadow biosphere.' Felisa Wolfe-Simon, the geobiologist credited with this (Iron Lisa = Felisa, get it?) led me to an interesting PDF that begins:

If you were asked to speculate about the form extra-terrestrial life on Mars might take, which geomicrobial phenomenon might you select as a model system, assuming that life on Mars would be 'primitive'? Give your reasons.

At the end of my senior year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1968, I took Professor Ehrlich’s final for his Geomicrobiology course. The above question beckoned to me like the Sirens to Odysseus, for if I answered, it would take so much time and thought that I would never get around to the exam’s other essay questions and consequently, would be "shipwrecked" by flunking the course. So, I passed it up.With this 41-year perspective in mind, this manuscript is now submitted to Professor Ehrlich for (belated) "extra-credit." R.S. Oremland

This has been an interesting topic in sci-fi, I recall an X-Files that revolved around silicon based life.

I certainly hope that we get more details than this teaser (all other news articles seem to point back to Gizmodo). From the sound of this leak I can't tell if the DNA itself is foreign or if it's made of the same Adenine, Thymine, Guanine and Cytosine with similar hydrogen bonds or if the DNA is similar but different in functionality or if it doesn't create proteins and RNA the same way or if phosphorus component is just switched with arsenic (two very similar elements prebiotic chemically) or if the whole bacteria is made of arsenic. At what point in the chain of DNA to organism does this thing seriously differ? The Gizmodo article is painfully weak on detail.

Can we finally, finally, finally

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Can we finally, finally, finally

[ChromaticDragon]

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.

Re:I think that's a stretch.

[Monkeedude1212]

No... Don't you understand?

This is bigger than NASA's ammouncement...

THE INTERNET AGREED ON SOMETHING!

Re:Why not wait ?

[pedantic bore]

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

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

Re:Just wondering....

[Mindcontrolled]

Is carbon a deadly posion for an arsenic-based life form?

Such an arsenic-"based" life form would still be made up mostly of carbon, the arsenic would replace phosphor instead. So, carbon would be most likely harmless to them while phosphor might indeed be toxic, in a reversal of the toxicity mechanism of arsenic, which works, among other mechanisms, by replacing the phosphate groups in adenosine triphosphate.

The really interesting question is how an arsenic-based bacterium would avoid the effect of arsenic binding to sulfhydryl groups in proteins.

Re:Great

[Pojut]

Combined from two other posts I made:

If what's being reported is accurate, they've discovered a life form whose DNA was previously thought to be completely, unequivocally, no-exceptions impossible. Not just "we haven't found it", but impossible.

The point is that it means that life could exist in ways we haven't even conceived of yet. It's not the finding itself that's important, but rather the implications of having hard confirmed evidence that what we have long thought was wrong.

Re:Still carbon-based

[tgd]

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.