Sulfur based Alien life.

Hello there.

this isnt any type of scholary work so lower your pitchforks, this is mostly just speculation.

The ultimate question is obviously how does Alien life look like. The answer we will mostly only really get when we look at it. That could still take a while until we have boots on the ground on some of our Systems Candidates for life.

Since the conclusive discovery of Thiophene on mars i have been thinking about it a bit. For our DNA and RNA we use a Phospodiester bond. Its hard to answer why questions in Biology so i wont open that can of worms. In Any case, the Phosphor can actually be substituted by Sulfur and it would not make a huge difference energetically and chemically. Polymer science has shown multible stable Sulfate polymers, which would be a terrible plastic but would serve as an excellent Backbone for genetic code. It could well be that similar to DNA there is a Deoxyribose or ribose ring connecting it. Im too bad at Chemistry to even speculate on how it would look, but it should provide a stable base for life to evolve from.

Because of its simplicity and abundance of sulfur on other planets (phosphorus is rarer) it is quite likely that alien life would use Sulfur as one of its base building blocks. Sulfur can be used for Trisulfates to generate energy for the cells, together with Silicon it forms semiconductors and is able to generate solar power.

This minor difference could make a huge difference from terms of evolution, intelligent life should evolve much faster, and even microbes could present Einstein levels of intelligence, since they could and should have the ability to network and send electrical signals with much less effort.

Since it is likely a double stranded design i belief that some genes and some proteins may even be compatible to ours (and vice versa), which can allow for hybridization. This is not pure speculation, in that we could try this out in the lab. It would be quite a task sure, but definitely not impossible. To create sulfur based life. We can and should study Possible alien life before we do any return missions to candidate planets and moons so that we have some kind of idea what to look for, how to look for it and to determine if it is a danger to us. (Alien extremophiles may piggyback back to earth and well could cause some issues)

Thats it for now, a little bit short, but this is /r/Aliens and not a scientific paper. I have far more "out there" theories and if welcome i will share them.

Submitted August 28, 2018 at 07:09PM by Inesophet https://ift.tt/2LvWsRW