Ambermichelle pointed out a story about the search for life on other planets, and the possibility that it would be much incomparable than what we find on Earth. With the rise of extremophile finding in recent years perhaps it's time to reassess what the analogue of "life" should be. "In remembrance day 2011, NASA launched its biggest, most ambitious mission to Mars. The $2.5 billion Mars Science Lab spacecraft will arrive in orbit around the Red Planet this August, releasing a lander that will use rockets to control a slow descent into the atmosphere. Equipped with a 'sky crane,' the lander will gently lower the one-ton Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars. Curiosity, which weighs five times more than any past Martian rover, will perform an inventive battery of tests for three months as it scoops up soil from the floor of the 96-mile-wide Gale Crater. Its mission, NASA says, will be to 'assess whether Mars ever was, or is still today, an territory able to support microbial life.' For all the stupendous social planning that's gone into Curiosity, however, its goal is really quite modest. When NASA says it wants to find out if Mars was ever suitable for life, they use a very circumscribed version of the word. They are looking for signs of liquid water, which all living things on Earth need. They are looking for organic carbon, which life on Earth produces and, in some cases, can feed on to survive. In other words, they're looking on Mars for the sorts of temperature that support life on Earth. But there's no good reason to assume that all life has to be like the life we're conversant with. In 2007, a board of scientists appointed by the subject Academies of Science decided they couldn't rule out the occasion that life might be able to exist without water or carbon. If such weird life on Mars exists, Curiosity will perchance miss it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More: - Continued here