Friday, July 06, 2007

Life Elsewhere In Solar System Could Be Different From Life As We Know It

from the online science magazine ScienceDaily we have an article that at first glance we (and I mean the hard science fiction geeks amonst us) would say uhhhhDUH! but its clear that alternative chemistry lifeforms have got to be addressed....and so:

The search for life elsewhere in the solar system and beyond should include efforts to detect what scientists sometimes refer to as "weird" life -- that is, life with an alternative biochemistry to that of life on Earth -- says a new report from the National Research Council. The committee that wrote the report found that the fundamental requirements for life as we generally know it -- a liquid water biosolvent, carbon-based metabolism, molecular system capable of evolution, and the ability to exchange energy with the environment are not the only ways to support phenomena recognized as life. Presently there is the assumption that alien life would utilize the same biochemical architecture as life on Earth. This means that scientists have artificially limited the scope of their thinking as to where extraterrestrial life might be found.

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