It's life Jim, but not as we know it
As our search for life on other planets gathers pace, researchers have warned that we shouldn't just look for Earth-like organisms.
We'd be missing a trick, according to the University of Vienna, which has started a study of solvents other than water that might be able to support life outside our planet.
In a report in Wired, the Austrian scientists say the current strategy for finding ET is too 'geocentric' and will only be able to detect critters that are terrestrial in nature.
According to the astrobiologist Johannes Leitner, "presently we will not be able to detect exotic life, because we have no idea of its potential properties and by this, our probes to planetary surfaces do not carry instruments which can look for something exotic."
Water is only liquid between zero and 100 degrees Celsius, but other solvents are liquid over a much larger temperature range.
For instance, because ammonia stays liquid at a lower temperature, an ocean of ammonia could exist on a planet much further from its host star.
By exploring the properties of more potential solvents, such as sulfuric acid and formamide, the researchers hope to expand the potential life-supporting zone.
This will open the door for all manner of freakiness - weird flying 'jellyfish' in the atmosphere of a gas giant for instance.
Weird Science Factoid: It takes twice as long to lose new muscle if you stop working out than it did to gain it. Not an excuse to be lazy...
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Authors
Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
