NASA to hold press conference on extraterrestrial life tomorrow Options

[MARS]

A discovery "that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life"

Yeah, I know, somewhat overhasty news post, but I'll definately keep an eye on this tomorrow.

[Shock]

It's an 'astrobiology finding'. Perhaps they found some evidence of life conditions at some Jupiter moon. Its probably going to be pretty sciency I guess.

[MARS]

Naturally, I'm not expecting the great 'Reptilians are real and they're gonna eat us in 2012' shocker. Probably just another exo-planet with a high chance of oxygen and liquid water or, like you said, positive conditions on a moon within our own
solar system. I'd be pretty damn thrilled if it turns out that some probe discovered amino acids or non-terrestrial bacteria on Mars, though. As mundane as it sounds, that'd be all the proof that's needed to confirm that extraterrestrial life exists.

[Shock]

Some internet searching revealed what it is about, as really, scientific stuff usually isn't secret. However it is extremely interesting.

Its basically about this microbe that, unlike every other form of life on the planet which uses carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, sulphur and phosphor, this guy substituted phosphor for highly 'toxic' arsenic in its functions. The microbe, thus, could easily be disignated 'alien'.

The microbe only uses arsenic in photosynthesis, instead of phosphor. Even better, the DNA of this microbe is different from everything else in that it is based on arsenic.

It is very interesting as it puts a line on the problem that all we've been doing is looking for life, just the way we are, and this proves that there are other ways possible.

I had thought it would be something like this as, unless it was somewhere in our solar system, Nasa does not have the observatory power to do biology discoveries on stray planets.

[partyzanPaulZy]

I've heard about hypothesis telling whole Universe is full of life based on various kinds of metabolism.

Titania could be inhabited with microbes running on the hydrogen peroxide instead of water,
life can "run" on the silicon instead of the carbon or utilize the sulphur...

There is however one complication: what about the genetical information?
On the other hand it's possible amino-acids started their evolution in the Outer Space
or that Earth archebacteria came from Mars.

And it's known fact Earth bacteria live in antarctic ice, acids, lye, salt or fission nuclear reactor...

This post has been edited by partyzanPaulZy: 1 Dec 2010, 22:32