NASA today will be doing an announcement having to do with a new discovery in astrobiology. Just hours before their conference the cat is out of the bag and we have a small glimpse of what they could be talking about. All life that we know about on planet Earth is made up of six compounds. They are: hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, nitrogen, carbon, and sulfur. Now a new bacteria has been found that is completely alien to life as we know it here on planet Earth. This changes the way scientists will look at biology and micro organisms forever. This new bacteria uses a new compound that is deadly poisonous to most organisms we currently know about: arsenic. This is a completely new formula for life, and makes our known recipe for life no longer require the things that we once thought. I am not sure what else will be talked about at this conference, but one thing is for sure, we now know that life has other recipes that we are not familiar with. If we are made up of 75% water, and that is just one recipe for life, what other kind of lifeforms can result from this type of recipe containing arsenic, or other recipes we STILL do not know? I am sure they will be very tight lipped on exactly what they know (they always are) but this is a very interesting day in our human history, especially since no scientist has ever documented something of this scale. Welcome to the new era of space exploration. Now we can look at planets that we previously thought did not have the correct building blocks for life as we know it, as possibly containing a new recipe for life. I will be waiting with open ears listening to todays conference, and I will update this post with anything I have not covered.
