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Carbon don't enter into it. Just because something has a lot of carbon in it doesn't mean it acts like we do. There are plenty of other things to do with carbon
by TheSOB88 17y ago
Carbon don't enter into it. Just because something has a lot of carbon in it doesn't mean it acts like we do. There are plenty of other things to do with carbon than the ways organisms on Earth use it. DNA? Forget it, that was evolved. Alien biology will be completely alien.
- derefr 17y ago"Completely alien" is a misnomer—it's like saying alien computers won't be Turing machines, just because they're "so alien." DNA is simply a way of sticking polymers together to form a storage device and self-stable electrochemical API for accessing it. Organisms that want to reproduce, especially sexually, need storage devices. Likewise, oxygen is the simplest and most robust carrier of electrochemical capacitance. Aliens will have these things—not because they evolved in the same way we did, but because those are the most fit mutations in the early chemical soup. Sure, given an incredibly constrained soup containing lots of sulphur and no oxygen, sulphur-dependent life might evolve, but by the time it has evolved enough that it meets up with us after some good ol' intergalactic travel, it will probably realize that oxygen is a lot easier to manage and rewrite its genetics to use it instead. Or, to take that concept further, it'll be a post-Singularity machine intelligence, as mhartl said.
- TheSOB88 17y agoWell, you're probably right about the oxygen thing. I just meant that the chemical mechanisms behind their functioning will be completely different than ours. I mean, some Earth organisms have completely different RNA from ours. I do not expect aliens to have guanine, adenine, etc. as their storage device, but that's not to say they won't have one.