[ExI] weird life?

[John Grigg]

I always thought the life found at the very deepest ocean depths sort of fit
into this category.

John

On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 3:35 PM, Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com>wrote:

>
>
> Does Earth harbour a 'shadow biosphere' of alien life?
>
> Monday, 16 February 2009
>
> by Holly Hight
> Cosmos Online
>
> CHICAGO: A 'shadow biosphere' of 'weird life' unrelated to life as we know
> it might exist on Earth, giving new insight into how common life might be
> elsewhere in the universe, astrobiologists say.
>
> Finding life that doesn't fit with the types we already know would be a
> strong indication that life developed more than one time even on Earth,
> increasing the chances of finding it elsewhere, said Paul Davies, an
> astrophysicist at Arizona State University in Tempe.
>
> But nobody has ever seriously searched for microorganisms - or any form of
> life - different from the carbon-based, DNA-centred type of life about which
> we have long known.
>
> If we do look, Davies said, "It's entirely feasible that we'll find a
> shadow biosphere," he told reporters at the annual meeting of the American
> Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago.
>
> "Our search for life [has been] based on our assumptions of life as we know
> it. Weird life and normal life could be intermingled, and filtering out the
> things we understand about life as we know it from the things we don't
> understand is tricky."
>
> The tools and experiments researchers use to look for new forms of life -
> such as those on missions to Mars - would not detect biochemistries
> different from our own, making it easy for scientists to miss alien life,
> even if was under their noses.
>
> "When you don't know what you're looking for or what it'll look like, you
> have to come up with a whole scientific method for how to go about [looking
> for] it," added Steven Benner, a Fellow at the Foundation for Applied
> Molecular Evolution and The Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology
> in Gainesville, Florida.
>
> Scientists are looking in places where life isn't expected - for example,
> in areas of extreme heat, cold, salt, radiation, dryness, or contaminated
> streams and rivers. Davies is particularly interested in places that are
> heavily contaminated with arsenic, which, he suggests, might support forms
> of life that use arsenic the way life as we know it uses phosphorus.
>
> If we do discover exotic life unrelated to ours, it might not have
> developed here, Davies said. Instead, it might have originated elsewhere,
> then hitchhiked to Earth by piggybacking on a meteorite.
>
> But it doesn't matter where it originated, Davies argued, because it's
> still an indication that life has cropped up from scratch in more than one
> place.
>
> "If it's happened more than once in the Solar System, then the Universe
> will be teeming with life," said Davies.
>
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