Nasa unveils new life form

...on Earth, but this is still HUGE!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/dec/02/nasa-life-form-bacteria-arsenic

I think that this could very well be a bigger discovery than microbes on another planet--While ET life has been a goal of NASA and mankind for a while, instead of finding life where we already know it "could" exist, this discovery broadens the bar of where it could exist.

Huge.

I heard rumor that this was going to be their big reveal. Still pretty awesome. Now if they could find evidence of silicon-based life-forms, THAT would be awesome.

[off topic]
Also discovered at Mono Lake:

silicon would probably have been favored in an oxygen-free environment. remember that CO2 analogue in the Silicon world would actually be a solid.

It really disappoints me how some news reporters presented this discovery as a big let down. I always thought that a lot of astrobiologists limited themselves too much by our current understanding of life, and this will surely have a big impact on their research. Just imagine what mysteries are waiting to be discovered in the vastness of the Universe and even on our relatively small planet.

Xtroose said:

It really disappoints me how some news reporters presented this discovery as a big let down. I always thought that a lot of astrobiologists limited themselves too much by our current understanding of life, and this will surely have a big impact on their research. Just imagine what mysteries are waiting to be discovered in the vastness of the Universe and even on our relatively small planet.

Yeah. I've always thought that the all-too-common "life can only be like it is here, because that's all we have to go on" stance a lot of biochemists have is, to say the least, uninspired. We just keep finding more and more extreme organisms - Methanogens, Archaea, Thermophiles, and now these. What next should be the question in most minds.

interesting. I was in a chem class just the other day and the professor mentioned that arsenic is of course poisonous to life, and I'm thinking, well oxygen was also poisonous to life, why couldn't some lifeform learn to use arsenic? And whaddya know. Also, I plan to apply to do a grad level internship with NASA to do ET life research provided I ever survive fizzicks.

I remember this article on slashdot back in 2007 that stated taht we might have killed the martians simply because we don't understand that there could be more than just carbon-based life forms out there. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/07/2319247

OTOH no sane government would ever endorse (or even allow) any official statement bolder than that one. That -since so and so- it's not ENTIRELY EXCLUDED that there's life elsewhere. But dream on, we allow you that.

Acknoledging that there's a different life form with different forms of government, religiion etc. would the very least bring the current status quo upside down and bring forth questioning, revolutions and eversion everywhere, born from thousands of years of man-on-man domination (think Star Trek's "prime directive").

I, for one, welcome our new arsenic overlords.

Quasar said:

Yeah. I've always thought that the all-too-common "life can only be like it is here, because that's all we have to go on" stance a lot of biochemists have is, to say the least, uninspired. We just keep finding more and more extreme organisms - Methanogens, Archaea, Thermophiles, and now these. What next should be the question in most minds.

The funny thing is that speculative fiction has always been open to the idea of alternate forms of life. Methane-eating life forms? Been there. Silicon-based life forms? Done that. The sort of life that could form on a gas giant? Got the bloody t-shirt and the matching beanie. The fact that there are are actually scientists out there that deny that there can be any life aside from what we have here on Earth is a lot more surprising than any announcements of new forms of life they may find. I'm amazed how many so-called men of science will dismiss anything out of hand if it isn't already thoroughly documented in at least two dozen published textbooks.