Could Alien Life Have Completely Different Chemical Makeup Than Life On Earth? #briangreene #aliens

Why It Matters

Confirming life with a fundamentally different chemistry would reshape biology, inform the search for extraterrestrial life, and broaden the criteria used in astrobiology and the design of detection missions.

Summary

Physicist Brian Greene discusses the possibility that extraterrestrial life could have a completely different chemical and informational basis than life on Earth. He notes that terrestrial life shares common features—genetic coding, amino acids, proteins, and energy mechanisms—because we have only one data point. Finding life with a radically different makeup would be scientifically thrilling and could expand our understanding of what qualifies as life, though such organisms might be hard to recognize. A second, distinct example of life would imply that life in the universe could be both widespread and chemically diverse.