The sun is so large I bet all kinds of unlikely phenomena are possible at small scales. If there was life on the sun, would be know it or recognize it?
I expect there's quite a lot of "life" that we're overlooking, and that we're going to feel quite silly when we have whatever encounter causes us to broaden our definitions to include the rest of it.
Although to be pedantic, most definitions of life require that it be made of cells, and I doubt there are anything like cells in the sun.
Is there a deeper reason for that?
I'd rather exclude fire on the basis that it's "reproduction" involves nothing like heritability.
I do know what you're saying but it's so easy to argue the other way too
If the flames carried the characteristic shape of their parents fire, and they could be distinguished as not the offspring of some other fire by their features alone, then I'd be arguing that fire is alive.
I feel like I'm at risk of classifying certain periodic crystals as alive here, but they wouldn't meet the thermodynamic requirements that I have in mind (which fire does meet).
> but there wouldn't be anything about the fire's phenotype that would help you come to that conclusion
but... but... cloning!
But yes, we could do this all day and still get nowhere. We, collectively, are missing something but I don't know what.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemi...
It happens to the best of us.
Look at silicon on the periodic table. All of the things that make carbon great, basically silicon has almost exactly, except it needs a high temperature for most of those properties to be expressible.
That teacher didn’t know what he was talking about. Ridiculing a student for questions is such detestable behavior. The silliest questions can end up being the most insightful. I really despise teachers like that.
Here is a paper all about how your question was actually wonderful.
Your linked paper points out that the only viable solvent that supports a large variety of silicon chemistry is sulphuric acid, and even then it would need to be very poor in oxygen since silicon-oxygen bonds are so strong it ends up being much more strongly preferred over si-si bonds.
It makes for an interesting conversation, but I can't imagine spending an entire class going over what amounts to a massive distraction from the lesson plan.
All that's left is going to amount to an effectively dismissive answer, I suppose (though I agree that teachers who are intentionally dismissive are doing it wrong).
I’m thinking of Venus. That sort of environment would satisfy all criteria and would also start to get into the temperature ranges that would make Si-Si bonds possible.
That would at-least bracket the types of planets and their history to a useful extent.
In a lab, it makes for a good solvent, but any place that has sulphuric acid will have both water and oxygen.
Venus, notably, has little to none of both. What free oxygen that does exist is from CO2 and CO breaking down in the atmosphere from the intense and extended venusian day. Most of the sulphur on Venus is sulphur dioxide (a tiny percentage of the atmosphere), and water vapor is a measly 20ppm.
Even if all of that water was sulphuric acid (which it may well be), there's simply not enough of it staying still long enough to form the repeating patterns of chemistry that might reasonably be called life.
(My guess is that we still need a few thousand years to answer these questions. We still don't understand too may details about Carbon based life. I'm not very optimistic.)
We [1] can eat things with Nitrogen, so I expect a competing form to be completely eaten if they are less effecient.
I don't know enough about Boron chemistry, but if there were enough of them we will eat them too, unles they eat us first.
The first stages of living things are probably very ineficient. If you need a year to make a viable copy, a previus life form will probably eat you before that. I think that two independent origins of life in tha same planet are impossible.
[1] If you include bacteria and archea in "we". And even we (humans) can eat some compound with nitrogen, in particular proteins that mix carbon and nitrogen.
Boron nitride is weirdly analogous (indeed, isoelectronic) to carbon in that there's a graphite-like form (hexagonal BN) and a diamond-like form (cubic BN).
One thing that would hold back BN life is that by themselves B and N form more stable compounds than carbon does. Nitrogen in particular forms molecular nitrogen, which is annoyingly tightly bound.
Does this animal has cells? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophyophorea I feel like answering yes and calling it "unicelular" is cheating, but it's clear that it evolved from animals with cells and it has only "one".
Seems like a cell to me? How is it clear that it evolved from animals? It seems like clear protist to me.
It's a cell, but the (informal) idea is that a big living thing is made of a lot of small cells. If there is a catastrofic extintion and only these things survive, would and alien biologist clasify them as a huge cell or as a blob?
> How is it clear that it evolved from animals? It seems like clear protist to me.
My bad. You are right. I probaly mean from a normal living thing with small cells with only one nuclei.
---
Side note: I'm not sure it's related, but as a curiosity, our muscles have cells with multiple nuclei https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_cell
> Skeletal muscle fibers are made when myoblasts fuse together; muscle fibers therefore are cells with multiple nuclei, known as myonuclei, with each cell nucleus originating from a single myoblast. The fusion of myoblasts is specific to skeletal muscle, and not cardiac muscle or smooth muscle.