NASA announced this today. The lifeform was discovered on earth, but the key point is that it uses arsenic in its DNA instead of phosphorus. Apparently the two react similarly chemically, but it just majorly expanded our idea of how life can exist.

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/fea ... mical.html

Sweet, but i'm afraid my will is too lazy to read the significance of this find.

When scientists look for life on other planets, they always look for traces of the six elements that were thought to be necessary to build DNA and thus life. And if they don't find those, they discard the planet as lifeless. Now there are a lot more possibilities.

Hmm. Very interesting. Arsenic is poisonous to most life, so what happens if these lifeforms evolve - all out war? haha. Does phosphorus have any effect on Arsenic?

Anyway, if Arsenic can be used in place of phosphorus, does this mean that the other 5 elements could also be substituted with similar elements? *shrugs*

Still, it would be interesting to see where this goes. What would happen if we descovered an arsenic based lifeform that was interplanetary/solarsystem/galaxy-war-capable!

Arsenic is AS, Phosphorus is P. They're directly above/below one another in the periodic table, which means they have the same number of valence (bonding) electrons.. so in many ways, they're very similar, though Arsenic is a heavier element. Yes, other elements could also be replaced... one that's been hypothesized for a long time (but not found in the wild yet) is replacing Carbon (C) with Silicon (Si). Like arsenic and phosphorus, they're also directly above/below one another in the table. I would not at all be surprised to see that come up at some point as well.

It was always arrogant to think that any life out there must have been carbon-based.

heh...I think it's less arrogant and more based on available evidence. Arrogance is thinking that humans are the only life in the universe, or the center of the universe, or made in the image of god.

lol, true that.

And the way I remember it, the earliest stages of life were so ridiculously unlikely to begin with (and still not really understood) that no one really knows how and why, making it hard to make advanced assumptions about it. I think the carbon bias was more of a consequence of seeing nothing but carbon-based life forms around us, not a scientifically solid theory.

hehe...what's the difference?

Regarding the spontaneous creation of life, I think they've simulated spontaneous creation of proteins in a lab. Hmmm... after some googling I found reference to spontaneous generation of RNA. *shrug* At any rate, I'm fairly certain that we'll eventually figure out how life suddenly appeared. Or not.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/ ... cleotides/

Oh, I'm sure we will. If we don't wipe ourselves out before that point, anyway.

Besides, everyone knows we were created by the Annunaki!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zecharia_Sitchin

Hm. Him and L. Ron Hubbard should compare notes.