NASA discovers new life form

[Walter]

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/nasa-finds-new-life/

Hours before their special news conference today, the cat is out of the bag: NASA has discovered a completely new life form that doesn’t share the biological building blocks of anything currently living in planet Earth. This changes everything.

The press conference is in a few hours.

 

[Aazealh]

Interesting to say the least. I wonder what new possibilities for extraterrestrial lifeforms that will open.

 

[Lithrael]

From what I can gather it's not so much completely new as it's swapped out some basic building blocks o' life for other chemicals. It's changed the game from "life definitely requires A, B and C" to "life definitely requires A, B and either C or D." More specifically it's a critter that's using arsenic where everything else uses phosphorus. Still pretty damn neat though.

 

[Oburi]

I thought the new life was extraterrestrial for a second there. I woke up on my friends couch at 3 in the afternoon, checked my phone and opened Skullknight (as I do every morning). When i read Walters post I immediately jumped up and got on the computer to follow the link, only to find that the life is from Mono Lake, Cali . Still an incredible discovery, but like Aaz said, how many more possibilities does this open for extraterrestrial life?

Man, the excitement of discovering new life is too much. I'm glad I had that moment this morning, even if it was only for a short period. I'm just glad I didn't start waking people up first.

 

[Ramen4ever]

It opens quite a few possibilities. Arsenic based life forms, and since that base wasn't though possible before, there may also be other potential bases for life forms. It makes any search for extra terrestrial life both easier and harder, as now the range of planets that can sustain some form of life is likely to be wider. With the discovery of the number of Red Dwarf stars, it also makes a search very very time consuming, as the number of planets out there could be.. well astronomical.

Though the key parameters are still largely the same, range of gravitational force strength, max and min temperature, magnetic field, atmospheric composition and presence, etc.