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> life needs oxygen, anything else isn’t life. No. "An anaerobic organism or anaerobe is any organism that does not require oxygen for growth." https://en.wik
by SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
> life needs oxygen, anything else isn’t life.
No. "An anaerobic organism or anaerobe is any organism that does not require oxygen for growth."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_organism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_organism
FYI, yeast for bread or beer is anaerobic.
- novaRom 6y agoStrictly speaking every living thing needs oxygen atoms (for example from water), because they are a necessary constituent of the RNA/DNA machinery.
- ceejayoz 6y agoEvery living thing on Earth. The point they're making is that life off Earth might not use DNA/RNA at all.
- ceejayoz 6y agoThe poster is sarcastically pointing out the fact that a lot of our current SETI searching revolves around assumptions like "extraterrestrial life will have the same chemical basis as Earth life does". Like needing oxygen.
- bpodgursky 6y agoI mean SETI is literally looking for radio signals so this doesn't track at all. A lot of astronomy is looking for familiar chemical signatures yes, but it's more in the vein of "looking for chemicals which could not, to our knowledge, have been produced through natural processes". Which is not unreasonable IMO.
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago> The poster is sarcastically pointing out Maybe. If so, the poster is playing stupid games, and winning stupid prizes. We can't be sure - imitation stupidity is functionally equivalent to the real thing > SETI Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence Intelligence, not life. Radio-astronomy not microbes. Poster is not successfully talking about SETI in any way, sarcastic or not. Why they would attempt to do so in response to an article about Cyanobacteria is a mystery. tl;dr: As attempts to communicate go, it lacks many things.
- Voloskaya 6y agoYou are completly mischaracterizing it. No one assumes that ET life will necessarily be similar to life as we know it on earth, but we know life like we know it is possible, and we know what to look for to detect it, so it is certainly much easier than just trying to detect "something else", it's hard to find something when you don't know what you are looking for.
- ceejayoz 6y agoOn the flipside, looking only for Earth-like life - like focusing on the "habitable zone" - may be extremely limiting. Europa, for example, isn't in said zone.
- Voloskaya 6y agoThe issue isn't a lack of candidates though, we have too much data to analyse, so it's about filtering not expanding the field of search.
- edgyquant 6y agoWe don’t know for a fact there is life on Europa so why would we look for exo-Europas as candidates?
- ceejayoz 6y agoWe believe Europa may be habitable, which implies our definition of "habitable zone" is a bit too strict given that it tends to exclude Europa.
- andai 6y agoI think you missed the sarcasm.
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y agoI think people's statements should generally be taken at face value.