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Comment by card_zero | Hacker News Reader

It may just be a failure of the imagination, but on the face of it the only chemistry that could feasibly make organisms is organic chemistry. That's not because it's Earth's chemistry, but because carbon is a very useful lego brick. This leaves us looking for alternatives beyond chemistry, something like Douglas Adams's "sentient shade of blue", except imaginable and not nonsense. So your certainty about this is ... staunch, let's say.

Inevitable Wikipedia article about this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemi...

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I'm doing my best to tell this user that their imagination is possibly on to something, but mostly this is a waste of energy. I'm exaggerating the realistic possibilities to help them feel good about themselves because it makes it easier to sneak in the idea that this is not a useful or productive line of thought.

The approach of "Smart people have thought of that, there are very few chemically useful alternatives" is the kind of thing that entrenches a person in their insistence that this is just a wide-scale failure of imagination. Witness their comment about "earthlike biology perspective". They want to believe a wider, weirder universe is possible. As a rule, it helps people feel heard to tell them they're right about something.

So yes. I'm going to present it as a staunch certainty that something else is possible but currently unknowable, invisible, and irrelevant. I'm doing this in the hopes that the message gets through that this is not simply parochialist arrogance at work, from which they might nobly dissent.

Hi Kalium, I've rarely heard anything more condescending and arrogant to be honest.

>but on the face of it the only chemistry that could feasibly make organisms is organic chemistry.

First order life, but what about second order?

If I make a complex 'mechano-computer' that can reproduce itself, how exactly is that different from life? Now it looks like the universe doesn't have any direct way to go to silicon based life, but indirection over carbon based life first seems very possible.

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