Bacteria that thrive on arsenic have been scooped from a California lake, a discovery that redefines the building blocks of life and offers new hope in the search for other organisms on Earth and beyond.
Not only do the bacteria survive, they grow by swapping phosphorus for arsenic in their DNA and cell membranes, said the study funded by the US space agency NASA and published Thursday in the journal Science.
The findings add a new dimension to what biologists consider the necessary elements for life, currently viewed as six elements: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur.
"This is going to open up a whole new line of inquiry. First of all this can't be the only arsenic organism on the planet, there is going to be a lot more, so this is a whole new domain of microbiology." one of the scientist said.
I guess they'd need to agree on the definition of life before we can decide where it exists. Many explanations share the common theme of "ability to reproduce", but that fails because if you get a vasectomy it doesn't mean you're dead.
If everything in the universe is made up of matter then everything is basically the same, just in a different order, so therefore organic organisms would be the same as rocks or dirt.
Perhaps everything is "alive" If you put the requirement of being "self aware" in the equation. That would mean all politicians are dead. Hmmmm...finally a theory that makes sense.
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