Energy Based life

[Hunter Parasite]

Could a being that is based off of silicon or plasma exist?

[Malenfant]

No.

Not naturally at any rate. If we ever manage to create Artificial Intelligence (based on silicon chips) then one could argue that they're "based off of silicon" (sic), but those wouldn't be natural creatures spontaneously arising on their own.

Silicon is like Carbon but doesn't have the ability to form compounds that are as complex or dynamic. I'm no chemist, but as I understand it Silicon bonds atoms to it too tightly, so it can't do that easy swapping of nitrogen and oxygen that carbon chains can do, which is essential for life. Which is why rocks are generally so stable, since the minerals in them are made of complex silicon molecules.

Plasma life is just silly though.

I suspect that both are firmly in the realm of scifi and conjecture though, and so this thread would probably be better of in Purgatory (besides, it's vaguely about biology, which isn't physics or astronomy!).

[ajtribick]

I recall seeing some interesting stuff about complexity and self-organisation in plasmas (including in the Earth's upper atmosphere), but plasma life is probably best left to the science fiction writers.

There are of course organisms on Earth which use silicon compounds for various purposes, e.g. radiolaria.

[GlobeMaker]

There are books about early life that is based on Clay

http://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/~bobh/agcs.html

Dr. A. Graham Cairns-Smith wrote a book that I read called:
Seven Clues to the Origin of Life (1985)

The book defines life and it describes clay that fits the definition of life.
Mutations in clay crystal layers are inherited.

[Malenfant]

The book defines life and it describes clay that fits the definition of life. Mutations in clay crystal layers are inherited.

It's not hard for someone to define life in a book and then talk about something that - lo and behold - fits that definition. The reality is that there IS no solid, unambiguous, universally agreed scientifically-accepted definition of "life".

Rock and clay are not alive. Apparently clays can be used as templates or catalysts for replication by organic compounds, but that doesn't make them life. And crystalline disorder propagating through crystal layers is also not "life" by any reasonable definition of the term.

I'm doubtful that this matters much to the original poster though, it seems that when people ask this sort of question they generally listen to all the answers saying "no" and then ignore them and continue to assume that it's possible anyway.

Maybe somewhere in the universe, something that could - by some arcane definition of the word - be called "life" has evolved from silicon. But it'd be phenomenally rare, and so unlikely that we'd never encounter it.

Could such a being exist? Maybe, if a ridiculously unlikely sequence of events occurred (much more unlikely than the formation of carbon-based life on Earth). Would its existence matter to us, or would we ever be aware of its existence? No.

Continued discussion of this topic is very firmly in the realm of conjecture and fantasy, not physics or astronomy. While I'm not averse to people talking about it further elsewhere, I don't think such discussion has any place on this board.

[ajtribick]

Maybe somewhere in the universe, something that could - by some arcane definition of the word - be called "life" has evolved from silicon. But it'd be phenomenally rare, and so unlikely that we'd never encounter it.

In Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen's Evolving the Alien (or What Does a Martian Look Like? depending on the edition), they do mention transmissible mortar rots on Welsh churches, but Google isn't very helpful on this issue.

Of course, that required some carbon-based lifeforms to go to the effort of inventing Christianity and then making buildings to promote it, and I doubt mortar rots fit most people's definition of life, any more than, say, fire does.