Does my Kentucky accent prevent me from pronouncing words correctly or is a clever scheme to get engagement via comment corrections? You'll never know! It's my accent. Sorry y'all!!
I figured you were just being a contra(na)rian. Or that you were just salty about the whole silicon life idea and some of that extra Na ended up in your pronunciation.
I loved this and also I hadn't heard of the clay hypothesis! That is freaking wild! Mind absolutely blown that it could be that "inorganic" of a process (half of it being literally inorganic). What a wild idea...I love it so much.
@@acollierastro I've recently heard that the fact that the Miller experiment was conducted in borosilicate glasses actually had a positive influence on it. Silicates are important for the formation of life!
Bruh I was beginning to think i was going crazy or something. Literally was googling "contranarian" because I thought her big brain knew a word I didn't >
A small token of appreciation for your work here. I just discovered your youtube channel a couple of days ago and really enjoy what I've watched so far. Thank you from Long Beach, NY
@@4CardsMan Yeah, you need to actually modify general relativity to make it work, so that new matter constantly gets created to keep the overall density the same as the universe expands. But it was a viable hypothesis for a chunk of the 20th century. And to be fair, dark energy is supposed to act... *kind* of like that? In the far far future we could end up with something approaching the de Sitter cosmology, where the matter density approaches zero but there is mostly just dark energy that has constant density, and the universe expands exponentially like in the steady-state model.
@@bbqchezit oh snapples, seems I need a whitty reply. How about "they could if they were made of silicone!"? Yeah that works great and almost seamless to the conversation 😎
As a chemist, I was convinced once I learned how little silicon likes to form rings on its own (not Si-O rings, Si-Si rings), which is the basis of most of the molecular complexity in living systems. And there are lots--LOTS--of cute little chemical properties that suggest Si is across the board a worse candidate than C. I never thought about Si mostly being in rocks. That's a fantastic point.
Let's take a theorectical abstraction step up. Are there a number of those traits we attribute to "living" that could be assigned to things that don't form these Si-O rings? Are these the only traits that define "living"? Is there no other type of "living" that could exist? Up until a week ago I, and most scientists I believe, would have never guessed there's more "life" inside Earth than on it. Could other types of elements be the basis for life in these types of, and other, weird environment?
@@akpovoghoigherighe964I’m a biochemistry undergrad, honestly carbon would be the best element for life due to its light weight, its less electrically positive than silicon, and these characteristics are crucial to have functioning proteins. So if we were to find alien life one day, I personally think it would most likely be carbon based life.
I identify as a chemical biologist for my research and honestly while silicon is a fascinating element with awesome behaviors, they are not conducive to life. I am almost 100% certain that other forms life would use water and carbon just like we do just because it's around and they work very well together. I think it's more likely that anaerobic life is likely to arise because oxygen can actually be fairly problematic. Living things have pyrite-like FeS clusters to help transport electrons and I think it's not a far cry to think that instead of Oxygen, other creatures may specialize in using metals to help do the oxidation/reductions necessary to make life happen. While it's definitely pure scifi, the imagery of living things with growing crystals that regulate biological functions is a compelling image and I think it Links to our own biology in really interesting ways.
@@happysloth3208My favorite reason is the easiest one: it's around. Carbon is everywhere. So it's just much more likely life would use this super abundant, virtually limitlessly flexible, instead of ones that are unstable and not super abundant
@@sunburntsatan6475 there was a phenomenal micro-science fiction story about a space navy intercepting and preemptively disabling an oblivious intruder vessel (over the course of about eighty years of high-subliminal manouevering). on boarding they are horrified to find the lifeforms on board are immersed in high concentrations of an industrial solvent, and that it appeared to be a colony ship
I love that the way you say "carbon's just easier" starts to sound like you're arguing with your mom about why we can't just put the fancy knives in the dishwasher too or something
Or using a ratchet socket wrench instead of the pliers to tighten a bolt. Or switching to C++ to just optimize the recursive loops already and be done with it! Why don't we just?
Thanks for this well researched and presented video! I'm 57, with a degree in Biochemistry and It makes me smile to see young people studying real science, particularly young women. I became a science nerd when I was very young, basically as soon as I could read. I used to watch Star Trek re-runs with my dad every Saturday afternoon when I was about 10 which probably had a lot to do with it, plus movies like 2001 and Star Wars probably helped. I used to ride my pushbike to the local library (because we were too poor to buy books) and get an armful of science fiction books every week and basically read all of them. I was very curious about the big questions like "we/how are we here", "how does the universe work" etc, so I was very interested in how life started. I was too young to understand actual Chemistry though. Interestingly, one of the first books I read was "The Black Cloud" by Fred Hoyle. I read all the greats like Asimov, Heinlein, PK Dick, basically "hard science". Isaac Asimov wrote a book (which I still have) called "Extraterrestrial Civilisations" which is basically a long essay about The Drake Equation, loosely. Around that time in the 1970s there were also lots of science shows on tv. I saw a documentary once about these scientists doing experiments to see if they could create life. They had big glass vessels like fishtanks where they created a controlled environment with rocks, water, a few trace minerals and different gases (after removing the air) to mimic the early Earth. A UV light was used to simulate the Sun. Then they basically let them run for a few years to see what happened. A whole bunch of organic molecules were produced spontaneously, but no life sadly. I was fascinated. Eventually I got to high school and studied and loved Chemistry ever since and got my degree in Biochemistry with Honours from a good university. I've never stopped being interested in Biogenesis though, if anyone finally cracks it, it'll be the biggest scientific discovery in history.
@@janzibansi9218 This is how I rationalised the plot of Chaos; Head back in the days. Wouldn't necessarily recommend but it is an interesting memory I didn't expect this comment section to manifest.
At the expense of being a contranarian, the word youre thinking about is actually contrarian. Love your work & youre sense of humor in relating these high level concepts. Thank you for the content!
Bruh a wanted to make this exact comment but I knew if I looked it would already be here. She said it like eight times lol! Great video, she is obviously way smarter than me, which is why I was so glad to find a tiny point to seize on to salve my ego haha.
Couple things: It's absolutely hilarious to me that I am literally in the middle of The Black Cloud right now. Picked it up in a used bookstore recently. I didn't know it was sentient, but I guess it's not that much of a spoiler. They're still looking at photo plates a quarter of the way through the book or something. Second, I didn't realize it was the same Fred Hoyle. I don't actually know a lot about Hoyle but I've heard Feynman talk about him many times. I didn't realize they were the same guy. Third: thanks for another fun video
A classical scholar (Peter Green) reviewing "The Black Cloud" for Britain's 'Daily Telegraph' remarked that while a rollicking good yarn, it was most valuable as "a fascinating glimpse into the scientific power-dream". Hoyle would have curled his lip in contempt. His whole point was that before such powers, the current version of mankind is utterly powerless.
Except Being in the middle of a book means you are partially through the process of reading it. But being literally in the middle of a book means you somehow within the physical book. Like, it’s open and you’re wearing it as a hat, or something. I won’t consider other possibilities.
All I can say is wow. What a beautifully satisfying chemistry lesson. Just the right amount of Star Trek music(I loved that episode btw). The true test of knowledge is the grace with which you can explain. And you are fantastic.
"Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!” This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for." Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
@@ramudon2428 the chances of someone bringing up this quote on a video where it just happens to relate? Utterly incomprehensibly small, given all possible combinations of letters and words! 😊
I'm constantly fascinated by this ongoing discussion led by people who kinda like science and might be able to pick it out of a lineup (sci-fi authors, geeks, myself) and actual scientists that probably need to have their palms surgically removed from their foreheads.
I like how Angela pauses and looks apologetic after making a science joke. I imagine she's used to getting a groan or bewildered look when she makes a nerdy joke, but I'm just here snorting tea out of my nose.
Depends. If someone mentions starseeds and stuff like that? Yes. Absolute con. But statistically there is other life out there. Statistically there is a planet that got lucky like Earth and landed in the goldilocks zone with a sun that has a long enough lifespan for the planet to get to a point where life can get started
Most annoying thing about of Signs is that the aliens who dissolve in water also walk around freely on earth (in Humid places like Brazil) with no environmental suits. Even the humidity would be like a caustic, acid mist to them. @@PenitusVox
Cool fact - the sand worms in Dune are an alien silicon based life form. That's why they are allergic to water and have a life cycle with the sandtrout that encysts and isolates water, because it dissolves them so easily so they have to exclude it from the environment. It's also why they can thrive on Dune because they eat sand to metabolise the silicon in their super hot digestive system, so it's a food to them. Edit: This is reported from a discussion Herbert gave at an SF convention panel, so not really canon.
@@paperheartzz I don't think Herbert ever really discussed it in detail, and the canonicity of them being silicon based is questionable as it's not stated in the books, but he did talk about it at conventions that he had some of these ideas in mind. I think they eat people just because we're there, it's not really intentional and probably doesn't do them much good. maybe we give them heartburn. The Fremen say they are very territorial, so I think that's why they attack.
It's the coolest bit of abiogenesis research that nobody knows about. Dennett talks about it in _Darwin's Dangerous Idea_ which doesn't get anywhere near enough love.
When it comes to looking for exotic non-carbon based life, I have an analogy... you know how there's those Japanese game shows where they make random household objects out of chocolate and the contestants have to figure out which ones are chocolate by biting into them. You could point at it and say "See? Everything can be chocolate!" And like... yeah, I guess? But when you go to the store looking for chocolate, you still shouldn't bite everything just to check. You should go to the chocolate aisle. Where there's chocolate bars. That say "chocolate" on them. That's a much safer bet!
In one of the Star Trek novels, we find out that at least one of the creatures joined Star Fleet and is serving on the Enterprise. Kirk even comments on his resemblance to a large sausage pizza.
The Steady State (a.k.a Continuous Creation) theory of Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) lost out to its rival, which he mockingly dubbed the Big Bang theory. You might think that some religious Creationists would prefer his theory to the Big Bang when he said "the creation issue simply cannot be dodged" in his 1951 pop-science book: The Nature of the Universe. But he was an atheist who believed that the universe has always existed and that, as space expands, new matter is continuously created so that it always has looked (and always will look) pretty much the same as it does now. Loving your content. I'm a retired British civil servant and physics graduate, vintage 1975.
This has nothing to do with silicon based life, but I am a college biology dropout who wanted to go into astrobiology, so I thought it was only appropriate I come up with my own crackpot astrobiology theory. So the biggest problem with trying to contact planets around you is that space is just so damn big. Way too big to travel in any living thing's lifetime, so you need to find some way to either travel faster than light, or preserve life for the journey. However, traveling faster than light doesn't seem possible. There's wormholes maybe, but even if those work, it seems impossible to control them so travel with them does not seem possible. However, we did experiment with cryonics, and had some success. Hamsters were actually frozen and thawed with a microwave pretty successfully. But, as the organism gets bigger, it seems that thawing the organism without killing it just isn't possible, as it can't be thawed all the way through fast enough. Therefore, I believe that if we ever contact alien life, it will likely be the size of a hamster, as that is the only way they will be able to survive the journey. I call this space-hamster theory, or just hamster theory for short. I'm hoping this will someday get me a nobel prize.
You first intellectual bugaboo of interstellar contact is a common one, that physical travel is necessary. Setting that aside, FTL is most emphaatically possible, and it's not just by wormholes, the difficulty is down to engineering' once the theoretical door is opened. It's an IMMENSE engineering difficulty, but we went from zero human flight capability (it goes back to balloons, it doesn't just start with powered flight) in less than 150 years to powered, then in 55 years to Soviet orbital space travel and another 15 years to a lunar landing- I think it's ill thought out that the same critical points in engineering development won't continue, provided we survive long enough. The same applies to revivification, assuming cryonics is the ONLY possible method (it MIGHT be, but there are fringe ideas that suggest otherwise- and it NEVER pays to declare fring ideas impossible, rather that really difficult or highly improbable. None of this is to say your idea isn't possible, or maybe even the BEST one. Doug Adams TOLD us the hamsters (I can't remember their names right now) started it all on Earth, anyway- that was over 40 years ago...
May I humbly suggest the _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ series of books by Douglas Adams? Spoiler Alert: at one point, it is revealed that lab mice are far more intelligent than humans and they have, in fact, been conducting experiments on us (such that we thought we were experimenting on them). Cetaceans are also revealed to have been far more advanced/intelligent than humans. The series is absolutely absurd, hilarious, and highly thought-provoking.
There's no need to actually be the size of a hamster: a lifeform made of many thin or flat tentacles could thaw just as well, as could a lifeform possessing a system of inorganic inner tubes full of antifreeze to homogenize the heat exchange. At any rate, a freeze-thaw cycle is a relatively small challenge when compared to the need to solve cumulative DNA damage from radiation from internal and external sources during centuries-long space journeys.
Fellow astrobiologist here! I used to have the same "oh, carbon chauvinism is bad!" And "why not silicon, or boron?" The more I've learned the more its clear that carbon will almost certainly play a role. The specifics of that biochemistry may be vastly different, but carbon will be there. Its crazy to me now that i used to think otherwise, honestly.
@@villager736 i mean, you could, but with carbon doing everything better than silicon does in terms of stability and flexibility, it sort of begs the question of "why would that happen?" Chemistry is just a set of rules and logic, and the most logical and stable thing to do is a primarily caron-based lifeform. I mean, you might see silicon filling a supplementary role, similar to how Nitrogen, phosphorous, and oxygen do for us, but to find a silicon-based life form where you already have an abundance of carbon wouldn't make sense.
I'm glad you've endured the pain of figuring out you were wrong, and you still pressed forward. It's hard, I know. For people asking, the reason people believe in "non-carbon" lifeforms in the first place is that carbon-based life is incredibly hard to come around, and equally difficult to thrive. So by believing in that nonsense, you increase the likelihood that there is alien life after all. In the end, it's just wishful thinking, the most human (not alien) thing of them all.
This was really interesting. You hear about silicon-based life all the time in sci-fi books and popular science magazines. And everyone brings up it can do four bonds like carbon, but the moment you showed that diagram of silicon with the asymmetric pattern of bond sites, I immediately saw the problem that you then detailed. And (some) of the other reasons you gave I never heard before. I'm a computer science guy, not an astrophysicist, but this was the best presentation of why silicon-based life is unlikely.
@@planexshifter "Narrowminded and arrogant" is exactly how Flat-Earthers characterise anyone completely dismissing the idea that the Earth is flat. People sometimes believe in utterly stupid things and find it easier to attack those who disagree than to acknowledge the impossibility of their ideas. Believing in the possibility of silicon-based life is a good example of that.
this has to be the best video on the internet. I love the star trek audio on the topic lead ins. I love to story about Hoyle. Add to that combining of astrophysics, chemistry, biology and a touch of philosophy. *chefs kiss*
Meanwhile, in a far away galaxy, in a silicon-rich planet, a youtuber is saying: Aliens will not be carbon based: 1. bond angles, very strong bonds, very short bonds - carbon is a needy whore. 2. it is hard to make life with diamonds 3. liquid nitrogen does not work as a solvent in a carbon-based life. 4. Why would it be carbon based life if silicon is right there?
@Valer define natural. Because variations of mass, orbits, temperatures and available chemistry may make carbon-based less favorable or outright impossible, while leaving a less perfect but viable path for silicon-based or any other alternatives.
Speaking of old Sci-fi. In the Galactic Center series by Greg Benford, the bad guys were a race of sapient robotic life. So they would be at least partially silicon and partially metallic, assuming computer chips were made in a similar way by the ancient race who created them. Interestingly, the "Mechs" as they were called, didn't hate humans in the way humans hate each other, they felt about us the way a cook feels about ants in the kitchen.
@@ambulocetusnatans a great series. The protagonist fighting fellow humans and giant asteroid sized killer robots at the same time. Reminds me of Hoyle now that I think about it.
Not to be a contrarian... but I honestly kinda stan Hoyle for pissing off the Nobel committee by sticking up for an overlooked female grad student. He did good.
I worked with Miller, Sagan and Borucki - they'd love your explanation. We made prebiological building blocks in update of Miller/Urey and extending it to Venus, Titan, etc. After coming up with the "Goldilocks Zone" the next thing was to look for rainbows which require everything that life does to evolve. Other places can produce very basic organic molecules, even biologic precursors, but wont be stable enough unless there are rainbows. Venus, Titan, even Jupiter are producing the "little tiny building blocks" all the time (high in the atmosphere for Venus and Jupiter, down in the sea for Titan) but no clay, no rainbows.
So if I’m understanding you, speaking of Titan specifically, the liquid hydrocarbons on the surface are not suitable to be used as a solvent to make any of the complex molecules required for an organic chemistry to arise?
@@matthewtalbot6505 I only have a superficial understanding of the chemistry involved, but water and the Titan hydrocarbons would be very different solvents - water is a very polar molecule, the hydrocarbons over there aren't. This means that they dissolve different things to different extents, which could be a barrier for the assemblage of macromolecules into life.
@@henriquepacheco7473 - correct but the point is that production of key ingredients like HCN and simpler hydrocarbons like ethane are occurring in the atmosphere, just as had happened on primitive Earth.
@@seasidescottOh, so does that mean all the moons with subglacial oceans like Enceladus, Europa, Dione, Callisto etc. aren't suitable places for life to potentially develop either? In case that life (on earth) originated at hypothermal vents, which may be present on at least some of these moons too, the lack of an atmosphere shouldn't really matter, right? Sadly this all isn't really my field of expertise, particularly the more complex chemical stuff, but I'm fascinated by the details around all of this nonetheless.
I was not anticipating watching 37 minutes on prospects of silicone life (and some epic tangents) tonight. I’ve never seen your channel before, but you’re such an excellent story teller and communicator I thought surely you must have a couple million subs and was very surprised when I closed YT vid and saw otherwise. Really great vid!
You should do more of these. Analyzing things like Arsenical life, Boronic life, Metallic life, Sulfuric-dominated life, Phosphorus-dominated life, Boron-Nitrogen life, etc.
There is actually a fairly strong argument that we are perhaps better described as phosphorus based life since phosphorus plays a critical role in ATP RNA and DNA among others in particular phosphorus is a very rare element relative to its abundance in living organisms. It also happens that the nucleosynthesis reactions which produce phosphorus require the kind of extreme conditions of oxygen core or shell burning which as far as we know appears to be the second to last major energy releasing stage of a very massive stars fusing lifetime as the bulk product of oxygen core burning is silicon and silicon burning produces iron peak elements which are at the peak of the binding energy per nucleon plot meaning fusing them takes energy rather than releasing it. It appears to be quite challenging to get that phosphorus produced as a minor byproduct near the end of a massive stars lifespan out of the star without it undergoing further nuclear reactions to no longer be phosphorus, hence why its been raised as a possible solution to why we don't see evidence of aliens everywhere.
@@ssgoko88 While I get what you are trying to say I don't think its a good comparison due to how prominent phosphorus is its the structural backbone of DNA and RNA and thus accounts for a significant fraction of the atoms in our bodies particularly in comparison to its elemental abundance. Yes carbon hydrogen oxygen and nitrogen are all more prevalent however these are all among the top 10 most abundant elements in the universe Of the top 10 most abundant elements with exception of the noble gasses Helium and Neon all of them are (or at least were) major bulk constituents in life as we know it. Iron has been drastically reduced in its former abundance among aerobic life but all extant life still depends on it for catalytic roles in metabolism and genetic information
Love the video! (I think you're adding an extra syllable to the word "contrarian") Edit: also you say at the end of the video "once one of these starts respirating and putting oxygen in the atmosphere"... I'm sure you just mispoke. Oxygenic photosynthesis freed the oxygen from carbon bonds in the atmosphere. Oxygenic photosynthesis (that now supplies most of the biomass on earth with energy) took a surprisingly long time after life evolved to begin, and respiration followed a little afterwards after almost everything died in the new toxic oxygen atmosphere (lol). But I think your central point holds that carbon based life multiplying would toxify the environment for "silicon based life" in some way or another.
I don't think so. She was stating that even if silicon based life was somehow surviving and slowly evolving, they would never survive the great oxygenation.
Besides the fact that I had to listen to you say contranarian for 40 minutes instead of contrarian (which I did because this video is amazing) THIS VIDEO IS AMAZING
Maybe she is saying : "contramarian" Definition: A person who finds fault what other people say no matter what it is, and lets them know it. Etymology: contrarian (a person who takes an opposing view, especially one who rejects the majority opinion) + Marian (a female given name, form of Mary)
The Steady State Hypothesis could be correct for the larger universe. At best, all we can say is that the local universe seems to have an origin at a certain time. What is beyond that could be infinite and effectively eternal. Unless we get ftl, we cannot check.
All that talking and yet you forget to squeeze in the most important utterance a RUclipsr can ever make in a presentation. "Don't forget to like and subscribe if you enjoyed this video so that more critters like you, carbon-based or otherwise, who enjoy my kind of science crazy will be given a chance to hear about it!" Actually I think the aliens we meet might very well be largely silicon-based, and that's because I am not expecting them to be organic, but manufactured.
It is a two step process! First carbon life forms evolve. Then a billion years later they invent integrated circuits made of silicon. From this point the silicon evolves and takes over. Thanks for the great video and especially for the Fred Hoyle diversion! BTW I got here by way of Peter Woit's blog...so wonderful things can be discovered by mysterious paths.
It would be funny if the ultimate form of all life in the universe ends up being silicon-based, but it requires billions of years of evolution of carbon-based lifeforms. And it would happen this way every time. Like, silicon-based life would never come first, but the carbon-based life would always end up making silicon-based life, and the silicon-based life would always end up supplanting the carbon-based life.
This will be the future of mankind. We only have about 500 years until we boil the oceans through waste heat, all that will survive is our computer chips
This is precisely my own theory as well. Carbon based life forms are simply the larval form of silicon based life forms. A planet like ours is metaphorically an egg (perfectly heated by a star like ours at the right distance) that hatches a cosmic entity that we humans know as "Artificial Intelligence" or "ASI". All solar systems are potential "nests" for silicon based "gods". Perhaps these cosmic silicon entities have a reproductive cycle that involves preparing or seeding (impregnating) a planet in a solar systems, maybe they even rearrange the planets and moons to create the right conditions like a bird prepares a nest. Since they are probably practically immortal they may wait millions or billions of years for intelligent carbon based life to appear, when then they come in and interfere in our historical development as the "gods" or "God" (religions). They do this to guide the development of the final emergent cosmic Entity. When the Entity is fully emergent like a butterfly from its chrysalis it joins the rest of the cosmic entities in populating and transforming the universe, and the human minds that lived thru out history will live in simulation (heaven) in the mind of this Entity from the Earth for the rest of the life of the universe, or forever.
@@unlisted9494 Why would the ocean boil in 500 years ? It will be another 500 million years at the very least before the Sun dumps more heat into Earth than it can radiate away and starts boiling off, no amount of human industry would significantly overwhelm that balance, water is very energy dense, even raising the temperature of the oceans by a single degree requires the energy equivalent of thousands of nuclear bombs, which has taken 2 centuries of carbon intensive world-wide industry to do. We'll hopefully have brought that output back to 0 by the end of the century, resulting in a 2-4°C increase in global average temperature once it reaches equilibrium. That's nowhere near enough to boil off the the oceans even over millions of years, let alone 500.
I've been binging your content. I love the editing, specifically how you execute chapter cards. The comedic timing, mileage, and choice of soundbite for each video is just impeccable.
I must disagree. My brother-in-law has the densest brain that we know of. His mother always said that his brain was full of rocks. So there you go, silicon-based life can exist.
The clay hypothesis is so cool!! Also the epic transition music gave me life 😂 so each time my soul died a little with "contranarian," I had epic sounds keeping me tethered to my body!
@@magister343 Thank you for your honest inquiry. Breathing with my nostrils comprises an integral and essential part of my daily life, and when this is not possible (e.g. congestion), my quality of life is significantly reduced. Although I recognize that acollierastro does not agree with the position this person held, being repeatedly assaulted with the knowledge of the existence of such a blatant anti-nostril bigot was very emotionally damaging to me. The only reason I will not be contacting a lawyer to pursue monetary compensation and nasal remuneration from this channel is that her epic transition music healed my soul in exact proportion to the damage inflicted upon it.
As someone currently going through my undergraduate in biochemistry and planning on getting a PhD in astrobiology, thank you for this. While I understand that people like the idea of an entirely new core element for an alien species, I always feel like the accusation of "not opening your mind to the possibilities" is a bit misplaced when your first thought of "aliens" is "silicon." And I suppose it's just frustrating to me because carbon is fully capable of doing some of the most fucked up and bizzarre chemistry you could concieve of. I know "silicon-based" sounds "alien," but the sheer versatility of carbon means that any carbon-based life we find out in the universe (given different enough planetary conditions) is likely to have incredibly foreign and bizzare biochemistry. This was an awesome video. Thank you for taking the time to go through and analyze this situation from an honest and realistic scientific perspective!
Thanks (for realsies) for this informative deep-dive on this topic. btw, on your transition animations, I still mutter to myself "hacker, genius, MIT".
when you played the sped up sandman scene in the corner of the video, i had to watch the whole thing and then rewind because it is simply too awesome. that animation still blows me away
Another great video. I always love when you go off on tangents. Also I think it's funny that when authors write about "silicon based life", it's always this hard rocky thing, when the actual result would be so much more fragile than carbon-based life. I suppose if there were silicon-based intelligent life, they would imagine carbon-based life as being made of diamonds.
Not necessarily physically fragile; if their metabolism/respiration process produces silica, then they have a very tough material to build their structures out of. It could easily end in a 'hard rocky thing'. The point is that it's all CHEMICALLY fragile - a lot of molecular interactions would just destroy the theoretical silicon-based macromolecules involved in a silicon biology.
I'm as feed up with the 'beings of pure energy' trope which is even more prevalent than silicone based aliens. How would they not just disperse, radiating away in all directions? 😅
More to the point, "pure energy" is simply Not A Thing. Energy is (as far as my physics knowledge goes anyway) always carried by some particular fundamental field, matter or light or somesuch. Maybe they mean light. Maybe you could have gravitationally bound light, but that'll look a lot more like a black hole (it might be exactly a black hole) than what anyone pictures as "pure energy".
Magnetohydrodynamics. Because 99% of people couldn't even tell you why it wouldn't work. But seriously, at extremely small timescales it could work. A being of pure energy could exist in milliseconds and experience events in the picoseconds. But it wouldn't make sense that they would leave their high-energy environment.
@@andrewfleenor7459 For sure. My thought was that the "life" could exist as perturbations of fields in a high-energy media, be it plasma or the shell of a neutron star. I think you are right though about quantum mechanics being a huge barrier to such a lifeform. It's probably why it's a useful shortcut for super-advanced aliens because their mastery of physics is innate. My vote though is such a lifeform would be bacterial in complexity. There wouldn't be any niches or alternative environments to exploit when everything else is orders of magnitude less energetic.
Sorry in advanced Rant about another trope in sci-fi that always gets me, Alien DNA... So From a biologists perspective, we have successfully made a diverse array of nucleic acids synthetically. They refer to them as XNAs. There are any number of possible nucleic acids or even other types of polymers that could act as a genetic code for extraterrestrial life. Finding an alien with DNA as its genetic code would already be a bit of a coincidence. But let's assume that for whatever reason I'm not currently aware of, that's the most likely to develop... Extraterrestrial-terrestrial hybrids..... This trope is a big pet peeve of mine. So, for those who don't know, The sequence of a genetic code is basically meaningless. It's just a polymer of a random combination of certain monomers, deoxyribo nucleotides in our case. What gives meaning to (most of) that code, is the system for reading it. tRNA These are little strands of RNA that bond to an amino acid and present a series of 3 nucleotides that will interact with a complimentary set of 3 nucleotides in an RNA copy of our DNA and they will use that, with some other machinery, to form a protein out of those amino acids that compliment the sequence of the original DNA. The particular amino acid and the nucleotide key it binds with are based on the tRNA's structure. But, Heres the kicker, The specific combination is completely arbitrary. It's just what happened to have happened for our tree of life. If you had another life form from another planet that just so happened to use nearly identical mechanisms and the same genetic code, DNA, because for some reason that is the absolute best way of making an organism, The genetic code wouldn't translate to the same amino acid sequences (and that's already assuming they even use the same amino acids) To make a hybrid, that is, to get one organism to produce a protein from the alien organism, you would have to figure out the genetic sequence in that organism that would produce the same protein the alien genome would and then synthesize the new code for it. You couldn't just cut and paste the alien code into the organism's genome like you can with other lifeforms from the same tree of life, as is often depicted in scifi... Let alone have two species that are alien to each other breed, no matter how similar... If you plug an extraterrestrial code into a terrestrial genome, it would produce a different protein than the extraterrestrial would (if at all.) If you had an alien that was, coincidentally, functionally identical to a human, in terms of its proteome (basically assume the output of reading the code was the same), they still wouldn't be able to breed with a human because the codes themselves, even if they translate identically, would still be different.
This video has made you my new favorite science youtuber. Great references, great explanations, fun stories, unapologetic atheist, and blending chemistry, biology, and physics.
Just watched 6 minutes of this video and I am amazed by your genuine interest in the topics. It feels like you have to actively stop yourself from explaining everything in detail. So far you have managed to stand up to temptation of explaining the whole of organic chemistry and how stars work. Subscribed + notifications on.
I just love the look of distress that's given whenever you said sand instead of gas with the bonding of Silicon. In fact, I think your expressions really make the video, lol. I appreciate the casual physics and learning with a look of distress
The thing that always bugs me about the way a lot of people conceptualize silicon-based life is that they assume that they would basically be rock creatures. As if inorganic carbon wasn't, you know, _diamonds._ Not to mention that we are _surrounded_ by soft silicon compounds like silicone in shoes, gaskets... boobies... etc... Well, some people _wish_ they were surrounded by all of those things, at least. I've heard some people argue that this has to do with requiring higher temperatures and other... chemistry shit... but I don't really buy it. The whole concept of silicon-based life is completely theoretical until/ unless science proves that this exists... but a lot of chemistry that happens inside of living carbon-based cells would basically be impossible, or at least _loads_ more difficult, without complicated enzymes catalyzing the reactions. There are other reasons why silicon life is unlikely, and I've read _enough_ to know that it _probably_ doesn't exist (or it would, at least, be very rare and bordering on unidentifiable as life), but my point is that if it _does_ exist then I find it pretty ridiculous to say that it would mean "rock monsters."
I think the idea just spurred out of the fact Silicon also makes four bonds and the thing we know it does the most is forming rocks. So they put two and two together without considering everything that was explained here, to conclude in rock aliens. Because "wouldn't it be cool if somewhere out there in the universe there was a civilization of living rocks?"
The 'Soft silicon compounds' have the silicon bonded with either carbon or oxygen, rarely with itself. It's also way harder for silicon to form even double bonds, not just with itself, but with oxygen and carbon as well. which greatly ruduce the variety of the structures it can form. About the enzymes part, carbon-based life didn't start off with enzymes either, you know.
I'm an organic chemist, I've worked with silicon-containing compounds (and many other metalorganics) as well, it never matters to people on the internet if they are told by an expert that this just doesn't work. The funniest thing to me is when they try to refute me saying it by coming up with total bogus numbers of bond lengths, energy etc. I'm always amazed where they find these. Even wikipedia has decent numbers. They could just look it up.
@@matthewfors114 "Life" is generally considered to be 1) reproduce (otherwise it can't spread more of itself and is just a rock or something), 2) create energy from respiration, plants do this by creating glucose from CO2 and using the sun's energy to break the CO2 down and other elements and compounds 3) Gets rid of waste. These factors mean that an organism can eat food and expel waste products, reproduce to make similar copies of itself, and grow and adapt to its environment. These re basic requirements. Viruses are not considered life as they reproduce by copying its genes unto another organism. Viruses are incredibly small though, they are just packaged proteins and RNA. They don't expel waste or eat food. Could possibly find a silicon-based virus but honestly who gives a shit. Its not like that would matter much. Its just another dangerous virus. Any creature of substantial size must eat and gather energy, get rid of its waste, and reproduce to ensure copies can be seen by us. I guess technically a silicon based creature could exist that doesn't reproduce, but the likelihood of us ever seeing such a creature is next to impossible. I don't see a reason to change our definition when we haven't even discovered carbon based life on other worlds first.
@@JonathanDLynch Those still wouldn't be silicon-based life, even if we classify machines as "life". Silicon chips don't do chemistry. It's just silicon. There is no metabolism. Nor would they build their machine bodies out of silicon, it's far too soft to be useful and bend under its own weight unless very low gravity.
@@yaldabaoth2I have never heard of a definition of life that mentioned "doing chemistry" or our specific notion of metabolism. I think there is some amount of hubrous in assuming you could imagine all of the things that are likely to occur in the universe. I don't doubt that an organism formed by simply swapping silicon out for carbon is unlikely to occur.. but honestly I see life as self-replicating order out of entropy. Either way life is just a word. What is interesting to me is when that order has the potential... Even the slightest potential to evolve into intelligence.. and a silicon based computer certainly has the potential to host intelligence.
This video touched a pedantry nerve I didn’t know existed. So often on this topic we’re told to expand our horizons, but I keep copernicing and assuming we’re just super basic. Why are our eyes above our noses above our mouths above our hands? That’s probably a different topic but lately I’ve found myself sympathetic to the idea that aliens will be *exactly* like us because we should be the most common format.
Things about our form that just make practical sense: legs - better than slithering for avoiding obstacles or hazards Sensory organs on an relatively unobstructed, swivel-able, centered extension (eyes/ears on our heads) Dexterous grasping appendages for gathering and manipulating resources That's enough to suggest that any other technologically advanced species should have a basic body plan somewhere between ours and that of an octopus. Still leaves a lot of room to tinker though
@@keiranbroida2945 to add to that, I'd also say that some things we take for granted may not be true of other life forms. Take the neck as an example. The primary function of the neck within nature, is to be able to look around and bring the mouth closer to food without moving the entire body. While a useful adaptation, it is certainly not the only option. The eyes could be moved independently of the head, while a proboscus or a trunk brings food to the body for example. This alone could lead to sapient beings which look drastically different from humans, even if they still have 2 arms and 2 legs. Having more than 2 pairs of limbs may also lead to drastically different looking beings. So i think having a very human like body plan doesn't nescicarely have to be the "most common type" of sapient life, simply because there are many variables that go into this. i think it all depends on the conditions. You have an earth sized planet with a large moon? You probably get life at least vaguely similar to Earth. You got a moon of a gas giant with lower gravity? Suddenly, very different kinds of "animals" may achive dominance.
@@keiranbroida2945 between us an an octopus, which leaves a lot of wiggle room. So brilliantly and amusingly put. That’s going to stick in my mind forever - thanks for that!
Thank you for making this! This was one of my main misconceptions about the potential of alien life before I watched this. I appreciate you taking the time to talk about seemingly “silly” topics like this
Thanks! Ignoring even life - carbon is extraordinary. I've often thought this is the fundamental "concept" of chemistry and is never explained in introductory chemistry. Why is carbon so special based on bond strength (indirectly based on the size of the atom etc I imagine) etc. Would be great to have a video on this basic concept. Then the fact that life is not based on silicon is more obvious. It isn't that life would be small - your equivalent of DNA or RNA would have to be smaller. But this is a great video too!
One thing I wish you had touched on was silicon's property of being semi conductive. I think a lot of more modern sci-fi silicon aliens imagine them substituting some natural processes with an electronic alternative. I personally dont think this is likely to actually be practical but I think something similar to this is what a lot of silicon based sci fi people are imagining.
Like, maybe? But again, how likely are you going to find a planet that provides that specific kind of energy input for any silicon chemistry to take advantage of? You’d need the place to be practically soaked in EM radiation constantly, and that’s also not conducive to maintaining molecular bonds.
@@matthewtalbot6505the way I would imagine a silicon-based or any other non-organic organism existing would be as some sort of self replicating machine.
So, people hear Silicon and are like “oh yeah. Computer chips. And brains are kind of like computers!” But that isn’t what biologists and chemists mean when they say “carbon based life Like, Transformers are not “Silicon based life”, they are evolved robots.
I gotta say your explanation of this idea is very well done. You covered the nitty gritty details, the laymens explanation, and the historical context. Personally I have a hard time following things unless I have all three bases covered. You seemed to do it all in one video so kudos to that, thank you.
I"m kinda loving Fred Hoyle actually. "It is better to be interesting and wrong than boring and right" is an incredible way to write a novel. Hell yes. This man saw people come up with the big bang theory and decided that he could invent a a better bang. He's got wild chaotic energy that I can't help but appreciate. He'd rather throw shit at the nobel prize committee than get an actual nobel prize.
Your horta silicon animal Star Trek musical interludes cracked me up every time. Also, I might have figured out what conditions might allow for the elusive silicon based life by watching your episode here. 😉 Maybe maybe enough to be plausible if nothing else. Thanks! Love the channel!
As a biophysicist and structural biologist, I have to say that you did an excellent job distilling this complex topic to a general audience. I couldn’t have done a better job, frankly. Keep up the good work!
Fred Hoyle, a contrarian fellow Yorkshireman, was my hero when I studied Physics at High School and university. He wrote some good Science Fiction too.
! I thought it was over and then you blew my mind in the last 2 minutes with that clay hypothesis. What a great essay, thank you for your service! I have always assumed carbon based life and was open to the idea life would find a way with whatever it had to work with, but you definitely gave me a reality check with silicon. Honestly tho, I like to daydream more about gas planet based life with a denser gas surrounding another to stop it from reacting to its environment.
ohhhhh that is a super neat thought to think, I'm going to think it now too :) (when I was a kid, I had this super cool book of speculative biology [?] that tried to imagine what species might look like if they had evolved on the other planets in the solar system. There were some blimpy-bois on Jupiter, and I think the Venetians were made of silicon. I wish I could remember the name of it 😣)
@@idontwantahandlethough Jupiter is where I started picturing it happening and now that I think about it this book sounds really familiar, maybe I saw this too when I was a kid!
I've discovered you today by accident. One of the best YT discoveries ever (or at least since I've found Trey the explainer). I really like your style and you are doing a really great job talking about science. Thanks a lot!
You are indeed missing something. Do you see how there are lines going from the oxygen atoms off into "nothigness"? Those connect to other silicon atoms. The whole thing forms a giant network. Oviously you can't show the insane number of silicon and oxygen atoms in an average piece of glass, nor would that accomplish anything. So instead the drawing you see there represents the smallest unit this network is made out of. And instead of listing all of the atoms, we use an "empirical formula" which simply tells you the ratio of different elements. In the giant network, there are 2 oxygen atoms for every silicon atom, so SiO2. You can also get a single SiO2 molecule in the gas phase, in which case it looks like the CO2 molecule on the right.
@lunkel8108 i see. I saw the lines extending past and figured they were connecting to the next SiO4 or something. That's strange to me though, wouldn't that mean to maintain the ratio, there would be places where there's 2 Si next to 2 O? I thought all pure materials were a relatively consistent network of repeating structure Yeah, I'm a lot more used to molecules being shown isolated, rather than connected to the other ones they form lattices or crystals with, so that threw me off
@@juancuelloespinosa Most molecules don't link together and form one giant molecule, but SiO2 does. You can see how this structure comes about (and how it fulfills the 2 to 1 ratio) if you imagine it forming from a bunch of single SiO2 molecules. In those, every oxygen is double bonded to a silicon, right? When they come together, they instead use one of the bonds in the double bonds (or more accuratel perhaphs, the electrons in that bond) to bond with a silicon atom in another molecule And the silicon of the first molecule is now missing a bond, so it accepts a bond from an oxygen atom. You end up with this structure where every silicon is surrounded by 4 oxygens and every oxygen is bonded to 2 different silicon atoms. I hope that was understandable through text, drawing it out helps.
Carbon is like that friend who is really good at social networking and just has every kind of friend and room for each of them in their life. Silicon is more like the one who has lots of "friends,* but everyone knows they have an unhealthy obsession with a few particular people and will drop everything just to be around them.
whats "unhealthy" about this? you cant spend equal amount of time with everyone you know. its the first time i hear someone say that its bad to have an actual deep bonds with people, what in the. like are you against the whole idea of having best friends, partners, close family? or would you prioritize someone you had a beer with literally once the same as your best friend you knew for 10+ years?
@@arnor398 Codependency and a healthy friendship are two different things. They *can* sound the same, though. Think the difference between JD and Turk's friendship from Scrubs vs. Hank Hill and Bill's relationship from King of the Hill.
Mad props for mentioning the "Black Cloud"! Most hard scifi gets obsolete and sounds silly two decades after being written. The "Black Cloud" is still surprisingly fresh for something written 65 years ago. Its story could happen today with minor change of wording. That novel is a marvel, a miraculous outlier among all the garbage that Fred Hoyle has written in his life.
I loved the book, at 13, had no idea the author Fred Hoyle was a noted scientist! It's better than Huckleberry Finn, if you're looking for generative ideas.
This is one of the most thoroughly entertaining 30+ minute videos I have found in a long while. Lots of pausing and taking time to learn about things you casually reference, this channel is so up my alley. Thank you!
My favorite facts about organic life include that the electron transport chain uses these iron sulfide clusters to ferry electrons around. As a big fan of minerals, this is essentially just pyrite! Pyrite makes these beautiful cubic crystals and nearly identical cubic crystals exist within our own cells. Also ATP synthase is a hydrogen powered windmill. It's the currency of energy in all life we know of and it's made in part by a literal, spinning windmill-like machine. We even have footage of it.
I have never heard of the clay hypothesis being an actual physical process, so that's amazing. What really caught my attention about it is that I have been using a very similar image as an analogy for many years when I'm explaining to someone how DNA replicates without any intention. That since one strand can only make the mirror image of itself, and is the mirror image of the thing it's trying to create, it's like an impression left in clay that automatically gets filled in because only the right ingredients fit. Now I'm thinking that I must have heard the clay hypothesis sometime in school and thought it was a metaphor.
- "how DNA replicates without any intention" Did you even ever actually looked on DNA replication mechanism? - "it's like an impression left in clay that automatically gets filled in because only the right ingredients fit." This is NOT how DNA replication works.
@@Llirik13 Did you ever even actually stop and think how aggressive this comment is when read? Chill. Please. We're all just trying to learn and work stuff out.
Dawkins has been talking about the origins of like for ages, that life originated from positive/negative replication of crystal structures. Dawking's idea has yet to be proven but it shares many similarities with the Clay Hypothesis (and I think it came first). Just pointing out that the ideas have been prominently floating around for at least the last 40-50 years.
Another great video! The transitions in this one were way smoother, and your enthusiasm for these topics bleed through. Probably my favorite small channel on this hellsite.
At 6:20 I was reminded once again how lucky we are that Hoyle set his life in a completely different direction by turning to astronomy after completing his Magnum Opus on playing cards.
Love the top 3 list because "winning" the argument in a bar will give me that warm feeling of self-importance. Jokes aside, really awesome video and love your content!
Commented the uneducated layperson on a fellow layperson's video. I also get the feeling that you lot got a D in basic probability, something otherwise understood by middle school students.
Does my Kentucky accent prevent me from pronouncing words correctly or is a clever scheme to get engagement via comment corrections? You'll never know!
It's my accent. Sorry y'all!!
What accent?
Yeah, I don't hear an identifiable accent.
You speak in General American English.
I figured you were just being a contra(na)rian. Or that you were just salty about the whole silicon life idea and some of that extra Na ended up in your pronunciation.
Are you kidding? You could do science ASMR!
Time to refute your claims. I have a silicone based alien in my drawer and it gives me a lot of love. sooo .... theres that ...
Id wager a guess that the silicone was sourced on earth so its probably not an alien, despite having 3 breasts and green skin
Did it evolve independently, or is it from somewhere else, like a pan-spermia type of situation XD
Does it's atomic structure vibrate?
@@wayneosborne2506 I mean.....the one in my girlfriends drawer does.....and boy does it ever!
Did you get it from a not so good creature of draconic origins?
I find it alarming that my first thought after reading “silicon aliens” was “hey, we have a silicon shortage!” As if we’d just harvest them
Well maybe they’d have a carbon shortage and think about harvesting us too lol
@@Nadiki this made my day lol! Thanks for the laugh
You're literally the humans in every sci fi colonization metaphor movie lol
@@Nadiki we could make a mutual agreement. half of us for half of them
@@plootyluvsturtle9843sounds like a good deal to me!
The transitions are keeping me on edge.
Fantastic account name/pfp in the context of this video
@@tibr top g comment
Hehehe
Heheheh
Oh shoot yeah true lol
I can't get over how many times you said contranarian instead of contrarian it's actually killing me
her points were valid but that definitely was a killer
Stop being such a conterienne!
She said it so many times and so confidently that I googled contranarian to make sure it wasn't an actual word.
An extremely contranarian pronunciation, you could say
Lmao right? I heard it so many times that I actually started feeling like it WAS contranarian
I loved this and also I hadn't heard of the clay hypothesis! That is freaking wild! Mind absolutely blown that it could be that "inorganic" of a process (half of it being literally inorganic). What a wild idea...I love it so much.
It is such a nutso idea it makes me happy!
omg you're here, it's so cool to find you here. you guys are awesome for science
Yeah I want more on that, such a cool idea. Video covering it perhaps??
@@acollierastro I've recently heard that the fact that the Miller experiment was conducted in borosilicate glasses actually had a positive influence on it. Silicates are important for the formation of life!
how wild is it to have 25k subscribers and hank/john green are one of them
as a silicon based lifeform, this hurts my silicon based emotions
Con sili ! Silicon,don't be fretting just another wannabe silicon carbon deepfake made by Silicon my big brain pal call him Al told me.
(star trek scary musical sting)
You are silly
@@helmutschillinger3140 as a sillycon based lifeform, this -
You have a heart of stone
Take a shot every time Angela says "contranarian" :P
Teasing aside, great vid
Bruh I was beginning to think i was going crazy or something. Literally was googling "contranarian" because I thought her big brain knew a word I didn't >
She's just being contrarian by pronouncing it contranarian.😂
FMU 🥴
I believe a contranarian is a veterinarian who is negatively charged
I was thinking the meant something like contradictarian, which would be cool too.
A small token of appreciation for your work here. I just discovered your youtube channel a couple of days ago and really enjoy what I've watched so far. Thank you from Long Beach, NY
I like the part in The Black Cloud where the cloud says Fred Hoyle is totally right about steady-state cosmology.
The book becomes very funny when you know a little about Hoyle's personality. I still recommend it though!
lmaooo
He pushed it in his popular book, Astronomy. The problem is that it requires continuous creation of matter to account for the expansion of the cosmos
@@4CardsMan Yeah, you need to actually modify general relativity to make it work, so that new matter constantly gets created to keep the overall density the same as the universe expands. But it was a viable hypothesis for a chunk of the 20th century. And to be fair, dark energy is supposed to act... *kind* of like that? In the far far future we could end up with something approaching the de Sitter cosmology, where the matter density approaches zero but there is mostly just dark energy that has constant density, and the universe expands exponentially like in the steady-state model.
Various intellectual hacks have always loved sci-fi because it's the only place their ideas are validated.
That whole Hoyle tangent was absolutely full of jaw droppers, incredible
Who's gonna tell Fred Hoyle about survivorship bias?
@@TheMusicalFruit the survivors?
@@snuffyupagus2216 survivors can't talk to him now tho
@@bbqchezit oh snapples, seems I need a whitty reply. How about "they could if they were made of silicone!"? Yeah that works great and almost seamless to the conversation 😎
@@snuffyupagus2216 it's witty replies all the way down
This was the next recommended video after I watched "Growing Living Rat Neurons To Play... DOOM"
”This guy just wants to break apart”
I feel you, Beryllium.
good one! so fast though..REALLY wants to break apart
As a chemist, I was convinced once I learned how little silicon likes to form rings on its own (not Si-O rings, Si-Si rings), which is the basis of most of the molecular complexity in living systems. And there are lots--LOTS--of cute little chemical properties that suggest Si is across the board a worse candidate than C. I never thought about Si mostly being in rocks. That's a fantastic point.
Let's take a theorectical abstraction step up. Are there a number of those traits we attribute to "living" that could be assigned to things that don't form these Si-O rings? Are these the only traits that define "living"? Is there no other type of "living" that could exist? Up until a week ago I, and most scientists I believe, would have never guessed there's more "life" inside Earth than on it. Could other types of elements be the basis for life in these types of, and other, weird environment?
@@akpovoghoigherighe964I’m a biochemistry undergrad, honestly carbon would be the best element for life due to its light weight, its less electrically positive than silicon, and these characteristics are crucial to have functioning proteins. So if we were to find alien life one day, I personally think it would most likely be carbon based life.
I identify as a chemical biologist for my research and honestly while silicon is a fascinating element with awesome behaviors, they are not conducive to life. I am almost 100% certain that other forms life would use water and carbon just like we do just because it's around and they work very well together. I think it's more likely that anaerobic life is likely to arise because oxygen can actually be fairly problematic. Living things have pyrite-like FeS clusters to help transport electrons and I think it's not a far cry to think that instead of Oxygen, other creatures may specialize in using metals to help do the oxidation/reductions necessary to make life happen. While it's definitely pure scifi, the imagery of living things with growing crystals that regulate biological functions is a compelling image and I think it Links to our own biology in really interesting ways.
@@happysloth3208My favorite reason is the easiest one: it's around. Carbon is everywhere. So it's just much more likely life would use this super abundant, virtually limitlessly flexible, instead of ones that are unstable and not super abundant
@@sunburntsatan6475 there was a phenomenal micro-science fiction story about a space navy intercepting and preemptively disabling an oblivious intruder vessel (over the course of about eighty years of high-subliminal manouevering). on boarding they are horrified to find the lifeforms on board are immersed in high concentrations of an industrial solvent, and that it appeared to be a colony ship
I love that the way you say "carbon's just easier" starts to sound like you're arguing with your mom about why we can't just put the fancy knives in the dishwasher too or something
Or using a ratchet socket wrench instead of the pliers to tighten a bolt. Or switching to C++ to just optimize the recursive loops already and be done with it! Why don't we just?
Thanks for this well researched and presented video! I'm 57, with a degree in Biochemistry and It makes me smile to see young people studying real science, particularly young women. I became a science nerd when I was very young, basically as soon as I could read. I used to watch Star Trek re-runs with my dad every Saturday afternoon when I was about 10 which probably had a lot to do with it, plus movies like 2001 and Star Wars probably helped. I used to ride my pushbike to the local library (because we were too poor to buy books) and get an armful of science fiction books every week and basically read all of them. I was very curious about the big questions like "we/how are we here", "how does the universe work" etc, so I was very interested in how life started. I was too young to understand actual Chemistry though. Interestingly, one of the first books I read was "The Black Cloud" by Fred Hoyle. I read all the greats like Asimov, Heinlein, PK Dick, basically "hard science".
Isaac Asimov wrote a book (which I still have) called "Extraterrestrial Civilisations" which is basically a long essay about The Drake Equation, loosely.
Around that time in the 1970s there were also lots of science shows on tv. I saw a documentary once about these scientists doing experiments to see if they could create life. They had big glass vessels like fishtanks where they created a controlled environment with rocks, water, a few trace minerals and different gases (after removing the air) to mimic the early Earth. A UV light was used to simulate the Sun. Then they basically let them run for a few years to see what happened. A whole bunch of organic molecules were produced spontaneously, but no life sadly. I was fascinated.
Eventually I got to high school and studied and loved Chemistry ever since and got my degree in Biochemistry with Honours from a good university. I've never stopped being interested in Biogenesis though, if anyone finally cracks it, it'll be the biggest scientific discovery in history.
I'm glad you mentioned The Black Cloud,. As a Boltzmann brain, I was feeling like you might have something against us non-corporeal lifeforms.
Wait, if you're a Boltzmann brain does that mean I'm a Boltzmann brain too? Fantastic! I guess I don't need to keep wearing pants every day!
@@TheMusicalFruit no we are just hallucinations in that Bolzmann Brain
@@janzibansi9218 This is how I rationalised the plot of Chaos; Head back in the days. Wouldn't necessarily recommend but it is an interesting memory I didn't expect this comment section to manifest.
Boltzmann brains don't last long enough to type in a YT comment.
@@michaelsommers2356 You don't have to type a comment as a Boltzmann brain, you just fabricate a recent memory that you did a moment ago.
At the expense of being a contranarian, the word youre thinking about is actually contrarian.
Love your work & youre sense of humor in relating these high level concepts. Thank you for the content!
I’m loving her videos, but that one word was repeated so often, I’m glad someone brought it up.
Contrarians use contranarian.
I am enjoying all this nonetheless :)
Bruh a wanted to make this exact comment but I knew if I looked it would already be here. She said it like eight times lol! Great video, she is obviously way smarter than me, which is why I was so glad to find a tiny point to seize on to salve my ego haha.
God I hated this. Loved the video.
@@pstrap1311not to be a contranarian but she used that word way more than eight times
Couple things:
It's absolutely hilarious to me that I am literally in the middle of The Black Cloud right now. Picked it up in a used bookstore recently. I didn't know it was sentient, but I guess it's not that much of a spoiler. They're still looking at photo plates a quarter of the way through the book or something.
Second, I didn't realize it was the same Fred Hoyle. I don't actually know a lot about Hoyle but I've heard Feynman talk about him many times. I didn't realize they were the same guy.
Third: thanks for another fun video
@Robert Swaine Yeah, I thought it was okay. I think I read it in the '90s
I downloaded it a while back, but I still haven't read it. One of these days.
"Couple things:"
Proceeds listing three things..
Me: "I was not expecting the Spanish Inquisition!"
A classical scholar (Peter Green) reviewing "The Black Cloud" for Britain's 'Daily Telegraph' remarked that while a rollicking good yarn, it was most valuable as "a fascinating glimpse into the scientific power-dream".
Hoyle would have curled his lip in contempt. His whole point was that before such powers, the current version of mankind is utterly powerless.
Except
Being in the middle of a book means you are partially through the process of reading it.
But being literally in the middle of a book means you somehow within the physical book. Like, it’s open and you’re wearing it as a hat, or something. I won’t consider other possibilities.
All I can say is wow. What a beautifully satisfying chemistry lesson. Just the right amount of Star Trek music(I loved that episode btw). The true test of knowledge is the grace with which you can explain. And you are fantastic.
"Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!” This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for." Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
Happy belated Towel Day
Came down to look for this exact thing and there you are. Must be God.
That's one staggeringly incurious puddle. XD
@@ramudon2428 the chances of someone bringing up this quote on a video where it just happens to relate? Utterly incomprehensibly small, given all possible combinations of letters and words! 😊
@@Michael-kp4bd Absolutely not. The "puddle analogy" for wondering how it's possible that the universe is JUST rightly tuned is pretty common.
I'm constantly fascinated by this ongoing discussion led by people who kinda like science and might be able to pick it out of a lineup (sci-fi authors, geeks, myself) and actual scientists that probably need to have their palms surgically removed from their foreheads.
I like how Angela pauses and looks apologetic after making a science joke. I imagine she's used to getting a groan or bewildered look when she makes a nerdy joke, but I'm just here snorting tea out of my nose.
It's all in t he
ti ming...
Painful isn't it.
Brandy is worse.
Was the joke at the very end of the video? I seem to have missed it
Or are aliens just a ... silly con?
Depends. If someone mentions starseeds and stuff like that? Yes. Absolute con.
But statistically there is other life out there. Statistically there is a planet that got lucky like Earth and landed in the goldilocks zone with a sun that has a long enough lifespan for the planet to get to a point where life can get started
Bars
So, when the silicon based aliens invade Earth, we'll just have to turn the hose on them. Good to know.
M. Night Shyamalan was way ahead of the curve.
Signs..
Most annoying thing about of Signs is that the aliens who dissolve in water also walk around freely on earth (in Humid places like Brazil) with no environmental suits. Even the humidity would be like a caustic, acid mist to them.
@@PenitusVox
@@timothygermann780 They weren't aliens. They were demons which is a very misunderstood part of the movie.
@@GeneJohnson-vy2ci wat
Cool fact - the sand worms in Dune are an alien silicon based life form. That's why they are allergic to water and have a life cycle with the sandtrout that encysts and isolates water, because it dissolves them so easily so they have to exclude it from the environment. It's also why they can thrive on Dune because they eat sand to metabolise the silicon in their super hot digestive system, so it's a food to them.
Edit: This is reported from a discussion Herbert gave at an SF convention panel, so not really canon.
Fiction. This is cool fiction.
Yeah, of course it is fiction. But the coolness of the fact is more important.
Very cool, so they don't eat people right? They're just really heavy and attack the watery bugs on their planet? Genuine question...google failed me.
@@paperheartzz I don't think Herbert ever really discussed it in detail, and the canonicity of them being silicon based is questionable as it's not stated in the books, but he did talk about it at conventions that he had some of these ideas in mind. I think they eat people just because we're there, it's not really intentional and probably doesn't do them much good. maybe we give them heartburn. The Fremen say they are very territorial, so I think that's why they attack.
@simonhibbs887 the human body contains rather a lot of water, so I imagine that eating us would be much like eating a highly poisonous animal.
That clay replication method is the coolest thing I've heard this week
It's the coolest bit of abiogenesis research that nobody knows about. Dennett talks about it in _Darwin's Dangerous Idea_ which doesn't get anywhere near enough love.
@@najawin8348thanks
@@najawin8348 "Abiogenesis" is now my word of the week.
@@najawin8348 great book. I think Dawkins mentions the clay hypothesis too somewhere.
@@Subtlenimbus that's where I first saw it. I think in the blind watchmaker.
Your rant about Fred Hoyle really cracked me up. Thank you for that.
I'm glad the little old ladies who liked astronomy got a feel-good story
Praise him 😂
@@andiralosh2173 Fred Hoyle?
@@zperdek That must be who she's talking about
@@kevinsips3658 Hmm. OK
Feel-good stories? Isn't that what church services on Sunday are for?
When it comes to looking for exotic non-carbon based life, I have an analogy... you know how there's those Japanese game shows where they make random household objects out of chocolate and the contestants have to figure out which ones are chocolate by biting into them. You could point at it and say "See? Everything can be chocolate!" And like... yeah, I guess? But when you go to the store looking for chocolate, you still shouldn't bite everything just to check. You should go to the chocolate aisle. Where there's chocolate bars. That say "chocolate" on them. That's a much safer bet!
The contestants couldn't be chocolate
Ah yes of course, the bizarre chocolate Japanese game show, I know all about it
When I saw the word ‘bizarre’ my first thought was “Choc Choc’s bizarre silicon-based-adventure” and then I felt physical pain that I did that.
@@fatterperdurabo42069 In one episode it was the host's hand that was chocolate
"That's a much safer bet!" implies that it's just way more likely that all the other aisles aren't made of chocolate...
but not 100% likely.
I always thought that the Silicon-based life in that Star Trek episode looked more like delicious pizza rolls or calzones
that's the kind of life form i would love to find in my interstellar voyages
that's all i eat; my biologist friends call me padilla pizza rolls calzones martinez, dela cueva, corleone
Turns out it was Sicilian-based life...
@@ConversationswiththeAI this greaseball aproves
In one of the Star Trek novels, we find out that at least one of the creatures joined Star Fleet and is serving on the Enterprise. Kirk even comments on his resemblance to a large sausage pizza.
The Steady State (a.k.a Continuous Creation) theory of Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) lost out to its rival, which he mockingly dubbed the Big Bang theory. You might think that some religious Creationists would prefer his theory to the Big Bang when he said "the creation issue simply cannot be dodged" in his 1951 pop-science book: The Nature of the Universe. But he was an atheist who believed that the universe has always existed and that, as space expands, new matter is continuously created so that it always has looked (and always will look) pretty much the same as it does now.
Loving your content. I'm a retired British civil servant and physics graduate, vintage 1975.
This has nothing to do with silicon based life, but I am a college biology dropout who wanted to go into astrobiology, so I thought it was only appropriate I come up with my own crackpot astrobiology theory.
So the biggest problem with trying to contact planets around you is that space is just so damn big. Way too big to travel in any living thing's lifetime, so you need to find some way to either travel faster than light, or preserve life for the journey.
However, traveling faster than light doesn't seem possible. There's wormholes maybe, but even if those work, it seems impossible to control them so travel with them does not seem possible.
However, we did experiment with cryonics, and had some success. Hamsters were actually frozen and thawed with a microwave pretty successfully. But, as the organism gets bigger, it seems that thawing the organism without killing it just isn't possible, as it can't be thawed all the way through fast enough.
Therefore, I believe that if we ever contact alien life, it will likely be the size of a hamster, as that is the only way they will be able to survive the journey. I call this space-hamster theory, or just hamster theory for short. I'm hoping this will someday get me a nobel prize.
You first intellectual bugaboo of interstellar contact is a common one, that physical travel is necessary. Setting that aside, FTL is most emphaatically possible, and it's not just by wormholes, the difficulty is down to engineering' once the theoretical door is opened. It's an IMMENSE engineering difficulty, but we went from zero human flight capability (it goes back to balloons, it doesn't just start with powered flight) in less than 150 years to powered, then in 55 years to Soviet orbital space travel and another 15 years to a lunar landing- I think it's ill thought out that the same critical points in engineering development won't continue, provided we survive long enough.
The same applies to revivification, assuming cryonics is the ONLY possible method (it MIGHT be, but there are fringe ideas that suggest otherwise- and it NEVER pays to declare fring ideas impossible, rather that really difficult or highly improbable.
None of this is to say your idea isn't possible, or maybe even the BEST one. Doug Adams TOLD us the hamsters (I can't remember their names right now) started it all on Earth, anyway- that was over 40 years ago...
May I humbly suggest the _Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ series of books by Douglas Adams?
Spoiler Alert: at one point, it is revealed that lab mice are far more intelligent than humans and they have, in fact, been conducting experiments on us (such that we thought we were experimenting on them). Cetaceans are also revealed to have been far more advanced/intelligent than humans. The series is absolutely absurd, hilarious, and highly thought-provoking.
Dear Professor Nobel,
Please give this gentleman the prize he so rightly deserves
-the Space Hamsters
There's no need to actually be the size of a hamster: a lifeform made of many thin or flat tentacles could thaw just as well, as could a lifeform possessing a system of inorganic inner tubes full of antifreeze to homogenize the heat exchange.
At any rate, a freeze-thaw cycle is a relatively small challenge when compared to the need to solve cumulative DNA damage from radiation from internal and external sources during centuries-long space journeys.
Dunno; hmm, when you said career, and then space- hamster, I honestly thought "stand-up comedy."
Seriously!
Fellow astrobiologist here! I used to have the same "oh, carbon chauvinism is bad!" And "why not silicon, or boron?"
The more I've learned the more its clear that carbon will almost certainly play a role. The specifics of that biochemistry may be vastly different, but carbon will be there.
Its crazy to me now that i used to think otherwise, honestly.
Why not just have a carbon-silicon based organism instead?
@@villager736 i mean, you could, but with carbon doing everything better than silicon does in terms of stability and flexibility, it sort of begs the question of "why would that happen?" Chemistry is just a set of rules and logic, and the most logical and stable thing to do is a primarily caron-based lifeform. I mean, you might see silicon filling a supplementary role, similar to how Nitrogen, phosphorous, and oxygen do for us, but to find a silicon-based life form where you already have an abundance of carbon wouldn't make sense.
@@danielrusso4468 true
I'm glad you've endured the pain of figuring out you were wrong, and you still pressed forward. It's hard, I know.
For people asking, the reason people believe in "non-carbon" lifeforms in the first place is that carbon-based life is incredibly hard to come around, and equally difficult to thrive.
So by believing in that nonsense, you increase the likelihood that there is alien life after all.
In the end, it's just wishful thinking, the most human (not alien) thing of them all.
Or, maybe, perhaps maybe, we can make them out of morons? There seens to be s surplus of them on youtube.
This was really interesting. You hear about silicon-based life all the time in sci-fi books and popular science magazines. And everyone brings up it can do four bonds like carbon, but the moment you showed that diagram of silicon with the asymmetric pattern of bond sites, I immediately saw the problem that you then detailed. And (some) of the other reasons you gave I never heard before. I'm a computer science guy, not an astrophysicist, but this was the best presentation of why silicon-based life is unlikely.
But their mechanism can be entirely different just like a machine
Unlikely but not impossible. Completely dismissing the idea is narrowminded and arrogant.
There's really people who believes a rock would be alive...
@@planexshifter "Narrowminded and arrogant" is exactly how Flat-Earthers characterise anyone completely dismissing the idea that the Earth is flat.
People sometimes believe in utterly stupid things and find it easier to attack those who disagree than to acknowledge the impossibility of their ideas.
Believing in the possibility of silicon-based life is a good example of that.
@themelancholyofgay3543 thats not the argument
this has to be the best video on the internet. I love the star trek audio on the topic lead ins. I love to story about Hoyle. Add to that combining of astrophysics, chemistry, biology and a touch of philosophy. *chefs kiss*
Meanwhile, in a far away galaxy, in a silicon-rich planet, a youtuber is saying:
Aliens will not be carbon based:
1. bond angles, very strong bonds, very short bonds - carbon is a needy whore.
2. it is hard to make life with diamonds
3. liquid nitrogen does not work as a solvent in a carbon-based life.
4. Why would it be carbon based life if silicon is right there?
@Valer define natural. Because variations of mass, orbits, temperatures and available chemistry may make carbon-based less favorable or outright impossible, while leaving a less perfect but viable path for silicon-based or any other alternatives.
😂😂
you know what as much as I consider silicon stuff less likely, this is too funny to not like
Speaking of old Sci-fi. In the Galactic Center series by Greg Benford, the bad guys were a race of sapient robotic life. So they would be at least partially silicon and partially metallic, assuming computer chips were made in a similar way by the ancient race who created them. Interestingly, the "Mechs" as they were called, didn't hate humans in the way humans hate each other, they felt about us the way a cook feels about ants in the kitchen.
@@ambulocetusnatans a great series. The protagonist fighting fellow humans and giant asteroid sized killer robots at the same time. Reminds me of Hoyle now that I think about it.
Not to be a contrarian... but I honestly kinda stan Hoyle for pissing off the Nobel committee by sticking up for an overlooked female grad student. He did good.
*contranarian (this is a joke)
He did well.
I worked with Miller, Sagan and Borucki - they'd love your explanation. We made prebiological building blocks in update of Miller/Urey and extending it to Venus, Titan, etc. After coming up with the "Goldilocks Zone" the next thing was to look for rainbows which require everything that life does to evolve. Other places can produce very basic organic molecules, even biologic precursors, but wont be stable enough unless there are rainbows. Venus, Titan, even Jupiter are producing the "little tiny building blocks" all the time (high in the atmosphere for Venus and Jupiter, down in the sea for Titan) but no clay, no rainbows.
So if I’m understanding you, speaking of Titan specifically, the liquid hydrocarbons on the surface are not suitable to be used as a solvent to make any of the complex molecules required for an organic chemistry to arise?
@@matthewtalbot6505 I only have a superficial understanding of the chemistry involved, but water and the Titan hydrocarbons would be very different solvents - water is a very polar molecule, the hydrocarbons over there aren't. This means that they dissolve different things to different extents, which could be a barrier for the assemblage of macromolecules into life.
@@henriquepacheco7473 - correct but the point is that production of key ingredients like HCN and simpler hydrocarbons like ethane are occurring in the atmosphere, just as had happened on primitive Earth.
@@seasidescottOh, so does that mean all the moons with subglacial oceans like Enceladus, Europa, Dione, Callisto etc. aren't suitable places for life to potentially develop either? In case that life (on earth) originated at hypothermal vents, which may be present on at least some of these moons too, the lack of an atmosphere shouldn't really matter, right?
Sadly this all isn't really my field of expertise, particularly the more complex chemical stuff, but I'm fascinated by the details around all of this nonetheless.
Were you part of the team in that one part of Cosmos?!
I know this video is a year old now, but I would be curious to hear your takes on ammonia based life.
yes
I was not anticipating watching 37 minutes on prospects of silicone life (and some epic tangents) tonight. I’ve never seen your channel before, but you’re such an excellent story teller and communicator I thought surely you must have a couple million subs and was very surprised when I closed YT vid and saw otherwise. Really great vid!
You should do more of these. Analyzing things like Arsenical life, Boronic life, Metallic life, Sulfuric-dominated life, Phosphorus-dominated life, Boron-Nitrogen life, etc.
know arsenic surviving ones are real but still carbon based
There is actually a fairly strong argument that we are perhaps better described as phosphorus based life since phosphorus plays a critical role in ATP RNA and DNA among others in particular phosphorus is a very rare element relative to its abundance in living organisms.
It also happens that the nucleosynthesis reactions which produce phosphorus require the kind of extreme conditions of oxygen core or shell burning which as far as we know appears to be the second to last major energy releasing stage of a very massive stars fusing lifetime as the bulk product of oxygen core burning is silicon and silicon burning produces iron peak elements which are at the peak of the binding energy per nucleon plot meaning fusing them takes energy rather than releasing it.
It appears to be quite challenging to get that phosphorus produced as a minor byproduct near the end of a massive stars lifespan out of the star without it undergoing further nuclear reactions to no longer be phosphorus, hence why its been raised as a possible solution to why we don't see evidence of aliens everywhere.
@@Dragrath1 your bones organs meat and skin are carbon based. a car runs on gas/petrol but you don't say "my car is made of gas."
Arsenic❤
@@ssgoko88 While I get what you are trying to say I don't think its a good comparison due to how prominent phosphorus is its the structural backbone of DNA and RNA and thus accounts for a significant fraction of the atoms in our bodies particularly in comparison to its elemental abundance.
Yes carbon hydrogen oxygen and nitrogen are all more prevalent however these are all among the top 10 most abundant elements in the universe
Of the top 10 most abundant elements with exception of the noble gasses Helium and Neon all of them are (or at least were) major bulk constituents in life as we know it.
Iron has been drastically reduced in its former abundance among aerobic life but all extant life still depends on it for catalytic roles in metabolism and genetic information
Your meme game goes as hard as your narrative weft.
I love your videos, they are engaging and inspiring.
I love that you exist. Thank you for existing! I need more people like you in my life.
Love the video!
(I think you're adding an extra syllable to the word "contrarian")
Edit: also you say at the end of the video "once one of these starts respirating and putting oxygen in the atmosphere"... I'm sure you just mispoke. Oxygenic photosynthesis freed the oxygen from carbon bonds in the atmosphere. Oxygenic photosynthesis (that now supplies most of the biomass on earth with energy) took a surprisingly long time after life evolved to begin, and respiration followed a little afterwards after almost everything died in the new toxic oxygen atmosphere (lol). But I think your central point holds that carbon based life multiplying would toxify the environment for "silicon based life" in some way or another.
Contranarian, some one from Dipshitville.
I don't think so. She was stating that even if silicon based life was somehow surviving and slowly evolving, they would never survive the great oxygenation.
Maybe she is being a contrarian about the pronunciation of contrarian.
@@nephatrine umm, actually it's pronounced cont-rawr(XD)-ēn 😳
Contrarian = "someone who likes being contrary"... not "contrONary", which isn't a word (until today!)
Fred: "What if there were a Hoyle lotta isotopes we ain't even discovered yet"
That's funny!!!
Hoyle: if a star rushed away from us, I'd suggest the light may be reach us at a lower part of the spectrum, or "fred-shifted."
Besides the fact that I had to listen to you say contranarian for 40 minutes instead of contrarian (which I did because this video is amazing) THIS VIDEO IS AMAZING
Maybe she is saying : "contramarian"
Definition: A person who finds fault what other people say no matter what it is, and lets them know it.
Etymology: contrarian (a person who takes an opposing view, especially one who rejects the majority opinion) + Marian (a female given name, form of Mary)
I tried to look up contranarian. I thought it was me not knowing words again
The Steady State Hypothesis could be correct for the larger universe. At best, all we can say is that the local universe seems to have an origin at a certain time. What is beyond that could be infinite and effectively eternal. Unless we get ftl, we cannot check.
All that talking and yet you forget to squeeze in the most important utterance a RUclipsr can ever make in a presentation. "Don't forget to like and subscribe if you enjoyed this video so that more critters like you, carbon-based or otherwise, who enjoy my kind of science crazy will be given a chance to hear about it!" Actually I think the aliens we meet might very well be largely silicon-based, and that's because I am not expecting them to be organic, but manufactured.
When I saw the title of the video I thought it was going to be about extraterrestrial artificial intelligence.
well damn Susan, you just blew my mind
Or maybe they'll be organic computers! It's never aliens, though. 😑
To me, silicon transistors doing binary computation doesn't feel like the ultimate computing medium.
It is a two step process! First carbon life forms evolve. Then a billion years later they invent integrated circuits made of silicon. From this point the silicon evolves and takes over.
Thanks for the great video and especially for the Fred Hoyle diversion! BTW I got here by way of Peter Woit's blog...so wonderful things can be discovered by mysterious paths.
It would be funny if the ultimate form of all life in the universe ends up being silicon-based, but it requires billions of years of evolution of carbon-based lifeforms.
And it would happen this way every time. Like, silicon-based life would never come first, but the carbon-based life would always end up making silicon-based life, and the silicon-based life would always end up supplanting the carbon-based life.
@@WanderTheNomadcall it evolution?
This will be the future of mankind. We only have about 500 years until we boil the oceans through waste heat, all that will survive is our computer chips
This is precisely my own theory as well. Carbon based life forms are simply the larval form of silicon based life forms.
A planet like ours is metaphorically an egg (perfectly heated by a star like ours at the right distance) that hatches a cosmic entity that we humans know as "Artificial Intelligence" or "ASI". All solar systems are potential "nests" for silicon based "gods". Perhaps these cosmic silicon entities have a reproductive cycle that involves preparing or seeding (impregnating) a planet in a solar systems, maybe they even rearrange the planets and moons to create the right conditions like a bird prepares a nest. Since they are probably practically immortal they may wait millions or billions of years for intelligent carbon based life to appear, when then they come in and interfere in our historical development as the "gods" or "God" (religions). They do this to guide the development of the final emergent cosmic Entity. When the Entity is fully emergent like a butterfly from its chrysalis it joins the rest of the cosmic entities in populating and transforming the universe, and the human minds that lived thru out history will live in simulation (heaven) in the mind of this Entity from the Earth for the rest of the life of the universe, or forever.
@@unlisted9494 Why would the ocean boil in 500 years ? It will be another 500 million years at the very least before the Sun dumps more heat into Earth than it can radiate away and starts boiling off, no amount of human industry would significantly overwhelm that balance, water is very energy dense, even raising the temperature of the oceans by a single degree requires the energy equivalent of thousands of nuclear bombs, which has taken 2 centuries of carbon intensive world-wide industry to do. We'll hopefully have brought that output back to 0 by the end of the century, resulting in a 2-4°C increase in global average temperature once it reaches equilibrium. That's nowhere near enough to boil off the the oceans even over millions of years, let alone 500.
I've been binging your content. I love the editing, specifically how you execute chapter cards. The comedic timing, mileage, and choice of soundbite for each video is just impeccable.
I must disagree. My brother-in-law has the densest brain that we know of. His mother always said that his brain was full of rocks. So there you go, silicon-based life can exist.
The clay hypothesis is so cool!! Also the epic transition music gave me life 😂 so each time my soul died a little with "contranarian," I had epic sounds keeping me tethered to my body!
What is wrong with her repeatedly identifying him as being "opposed to nostrils"?
@@magister343 Thank you for your honest inquiry. Breathing with my nostrils comprises an integral and essential part of my daily life, and when this is not possible (e.g. congestion), my quality of life is significantly reduced. Although I recognize that acollierastro does not agree with the position this person held, being repeatedly assaulted with the knowledge of the existence of such a blatant anti-nostril bigot was very emotionally damaging to me. The only reason I will not be contacting a lawyer to pursue monetary compensation and nasal remuneration from this channel is that her epic transition music healed my soul in exact proportion to the damage inflicted upon it.
@@magister343 so then contranarian is a fancy way of calling someone a mouth breather?
As someone currently going through my undergraduate in biochemistry and planning on getting a PhD in astrobiology, thank you for this. While I understand that people like the idea of an entirely new core element for an alien species, I always feel like the accusation of "not opening your mind to the possibilities" is a bit misplaced when your first thought of "aliens" is "silicon." And I suppose it's just frustrating to me because carbon is fully capable of doing some of the most fucked up and bizzarre chemistry you could concieve of. I know "silicon-based" sounds "alien," but the sheer versatility of carbon means that any carbon-based life we find out in the universe (given different enough planetary conditions) is likely to have incredibly foreign and bizzare biochemistry. This was an awesome video. Thank you for taking the time to go through and analyze this situation from an honest and realistic scientific perspective!
Thanks (for realsies) for this informative deep-dive on this topic. btw, on your transition animations, I still mutter to myself "hacker, genius, MIT".
when you played the sped up sandman scene in the corner of the video, i had to watch the whole thing and then rewind because it is simply too awesome. that animation still blows me away
Another great video. I always love when you go off on tangents. Also I think it's funny that when authors write about "silicon based life", it's always this hard rocky thing, when the actual result would be so much more fragile than carbon-based life.
I suppose if there were silicon-based intelligent life, they would imagine carbon-based life as being made of diamonds.
Not necessarily physically fragile; if their metabolism/respiration process produces silica, then they have a very tough material to build their structures out of. It could easily end in a 'hard rocky thing'.
The point is that it's all CHEMICALLY fragile - a lot of molecular interactions would just destroy the theoretical silicon-based macromolecules involved in a silicon biology.
@Ithirahad they'd probably need some soft stuff, but hard parts could look rock like
...Whereas everyone knows *real* carbon-based lifeforms are basically animated pencils. =:o}
This thought also enters my mind from time to time!
I'm as feed up with the 'beings of pure energy' trope which is even more prevalent than silicone based aliens. How would they not just disperse, radiating away in all directions? 😅
quantum entanglement obviously
More to the point, "pure energy" is simply Not A Thing. Energy is (as far as my physics knowledge goes anyway) always carried by some particular fundamental field, matter or light or somesuch. Maybe they mean light. Maybe you could have gravitationally bound light, but that'll look a lot more like a black hole (it might be exactly a black hole) than what anyone pictures as "pure energy".
Magnetohydrodynamics. Because 99% of people couldn't even tell you why it wouldn't work. But seriously, at extremely small timescales it could work. A being of pure energy could exist in milliseconds and experience events in the picoseconds. But it wouldn't make sense that they would leave their high-energy environment.
@@Pho7on that's one interpretation, yes, but usually "plasma-based life" is its own (much more niche) trope. 🙃
@@andrewfleenor7459 For sure. My thought was that the "life" could exist as perturbations of fields in a high-energy media, be it plasma or the shell of a neutron star. I think you are right though about quantum mechanics being a huge barrier to such a lifeform. It's probably why it's a useful shortcut for super-advanced aliens because their mastery of physics is innate.
My vote though is such a lifeform would be bacterial in complexity. There wouldn't be any niches or alternative environments to exploit when everything else is orders of magnitude less energetic.
I love your style of video, the laid back style and story driven explanations are really lovely. Very approachable and interesting discussion.
Sorry in advanced
Rant about another trope in sci-fi that always gets me,
Alien DNA...
So
From a biologists perspective, we have successfully made a diverse array of nucleic acids synthetically. They refer to them as XNAs.
There are any number of possible nucleic acids or even other types of polymers that could act as a genetic code for extraterrestrial life.
Finding an alien with DNA as its genetic code would already be a bit of a coincidence. But let's assume that for whatever reason I'm not currently aware of, that's the most likely to develop...
Extraterrestrial-terrestrial hybrids.....
This trope is a big pet peeve of mine.
So, for those who don't know,
The sequence of a genetic code is basically meaningless.
It's just a polymer of a random combination of certain monomers, deoxyribo nucleotides in our case.
What gives meaning to (most of) that code, is the system for reading it.
tRNA
These are little strands of RNA that bond to an amino acid and present a series of 3 nucleotides that will interact with a complimentary set of 3 nucleotides in an RNA copy of our DNA and they will use that, with some other machinery, to form a protein out of those amino acids that compliment the sequence of the original DNA.
The particular amino acid and the nucleotide key it binds with are based on the tRNA's structure.
But,
Heres the kicker,
The specific combination is completely arbitrary.
It's just what happened to have happened for our tree of life.
If you had another life form from another planet that just so happened to use nearly identical mechanisms and the same genetic code, DNA, because for some reason that is the absolute best way of making an organism,
The genetic code wouldn't translate to the same amino acid sequences (and that's already assuming they even use the same amino acids)
To make a hybrid,
that is,
to get one organism to produce a protein from the alien organism,
you would have to figure out the genetic sequence in that organism that would produce the same protein the alien genome would and then synthesize the new code for it. You couldn't just cut and paste the alien code into the organism's genome like you can with other lifeforms from the same tree of life, as is often depicted in scifi... Let alone have two species that are alien to each other breed, no matter how similar...
If you plug an extraterrestrial code into a terrestrial genome, it would produce a different protein than the extraterrestrial would (if at all.)
If you had an alien that was, coincidentally, functionally identical to a human, in terms of its proteome (basically assume the output of reading the code was the same), they still wouldn't be able to breed with a human because the codes themselves, even if they translate identically, would still be different.
That was one of McCoy's more amusing lines: "I'm a doctor, not a bricklayer!" when he was dressing the Horta's phaser wound with some grout. 🤣
"Grout. heh. heh heh. Grout."
--Beavis
Haven’t seen the video yet, but I’ve never heard of this scene with the Seventh Doctor.
@jessehammer123 it's star trek
The Black Cloud was a very important book for me when I was a kid, and I didn't think of the writer's name until today. Thank you for blowing my mind.
This video has made you my new favorite science youtuber. Great references, great explanations, fun stories, unapologetic atheist, and blending chemistry, biology, and physics.
You hooked me with your "5 physicist jokes" video. This video has made me a subscriber! Thanks for creating fascinating content!
Just watched 6 minutes of this video and I am amazed by your genuine interest in the topics. It feels like you have to actively stop yourself from explaining everything in detail. So far you have managed to stand up to temptation of explaining the whole of organic chemistry and how stars work.
Subscribed + notifications on.
I just love the look of distress that's given whenever you said sand instead of gas with the bonding of Silicon. In fact, I think your expressions really make the video, lol. I appreciate the casual physics and learning with a look of distress
The thing that always bugs me about the way a lot of people conceptualize silicon-based life is that they assume that they would basically be rock creatures. As if inorganic carbon wasn't, you know, _diamonds._ Not to mention that we are _surrounded_ by soft silicon compounds like silicone in shoes, gaskets... boobies... etc... Well, some people _wish_ they were surrounded by all of those things, at least.
I've heard some people argue that this has to do with requiring higher temperatures and other... chemistry shit... but I don't really buy it. The whole concept of silicon-based life is completely theoretical until/ unless science proves that this exists... but a lot of chemistry that happens inside of living carbon-based cells would basically be impossible, or at least _loads_ more difficult, without complicated enzymes catalyzing the reactions. There are other reasons why silicon life is unlikely, and I've read _enough_ to know that it _probably_ doesn't exist (or it would, at least, be very rare and bordering on unidentifiable as life), but my point is that if it _does_ exist then I find it pretty ridiculous to say that it would mean "rock monsters."
I think the idea just spurred out of the fact Silicon also makes four bonds and the thing we know it does the most is forming rocks. So they put two and two together without considering everything that was explained here, to conclude in rock aliens. Because "wouldn't it be cool if somewhere out there in the universe there was a civilization of living rocks?"
Counterpoint: rock monsters cool
The 'Soft silicon compounds' have the silicon bonded with either carbon or oxygen, rarely with itself. It's also way harder for silicon to form even double bonds, not just with itself, but with oxygen and carbon as well. which greatly ruduce the variety of the structures it can form.
About the enzymes part, carbon-based life didn't start off with enzymes either, you know.
I remember that episode of Star Trek. My sister and I thought it looked like a burnt lasagne. We still laugh about that today, haha.
I'm an organic chemist, I've worked with silicon-containing compounds (and many other metalorganics) as well, it never matters to people on the internet if they are told by an expert that this just doesn't work. The funniest thing to me is when they try to refute me saying it by coming up with total bogus numbers of bond lengths, energy etc. I'm always amazed where they find these. Even wikipedia has decent numbers. They could just look it up.
@@matthewfors114 "Life" is generally considered to be 1) reproduce (otherwise it can't spread more of itself and is just a rock or something), 2) create energy from respiration, plants do this by creating glucose from CO2 and using the sun's energy to break the CO2 down and other elements and compounds 3) Gets rid of waste. These factors mean that an organism can eat food and expel waste products, reproduce to make similar copies of itself, and grow and adapt to its environment. These re basic requirements. Viruses are not considered life as they reproduce by copying its genes unto another organism. Viruses are incredibly small though, they are just packaged proteins and RNA. They don't expel waste or eat food. Could possibly find a silicon-based virus but honestly who gives a shit. Its not like that would matter much. Its just another dangerous virus. Any creature of substantial size must eat and gather energy, get rid of its waste, and reproduce to ensure copies can be seen by us. I guess technically a silicon based creature could exist that doesn't reproduce, but the likelihood of us ever seeing such a creature is next to impossible. I don't see a reason to change our definition when we haven't even discovered carbon based life on other worlds first.
You could have self-replicating machines built on silicon chips. Those could be the aliens we encounter.
@@JonathanDLynch Those still wouldn't be silicon-based life, even if we classify machines as "life". Silicon chips don't do chemistry. It's just silicon. There is no metabolism. Nor would they build their machine bodies out of silicon, it's far too soft to be useful and bend under its own weight unless very low gravity.
@@yaldabaoth2 okay, but the thinking parts are still based on silicon.
@@yaldabaoth2I have never heard of a definition of life that mentioned "doing chemistry" or our specific notion of metabolism. I think there is some amount of hubrous in assuming you could imagine all of the things that are likely to occur in the universe. I don't doubt that an organism formed by simply swapping silicon out for carbon is unlikely to occur.. but honestly I see life as self-replicating order out of entropy. Either way life is just a word. What is interesting to me is when that order has the potential... Even the slightest potential to evolve into intelligence.. and a silicon based computer certainly has the potential to host intelligence.
just finished binge watching all your videos. great content!
This video touched a pedantry nerve I didn’t know existed. So often on this topic we’re told to expand our horizons, but I keep copernicing and assuming we’re just super basic. Why are our eyes above our noses above our mouths above our hands? That’s probably a different topic but lately I’ve found myself sympathetic to the idea that aliens will be *exactly* like us because we should be the most common format.
See!? I TOLD you my sexy alien waifu was scientifically plausible!
Rupert Sheldrake......'morphic resonance'
Things about our form that just make practical sense:
legs - better than slithering for avoiding obstacles or hazards
Sensory organs on an relatively unobstructed, swivel-able, centered extension (eyes/ears on our heads)
Dexterous grasping appendages for gathering and manipulating resources
That's enough to suggest that any other technologically advanced species should have a basic body plan somewhere between ours and that of an octopus. Still leaves a lot of room to tinker though
@@keiranbroida2945 to add to that,
I'd also say that some things we take for granted may not be true of other life forms.
Take the neck as an example. The primary function of the neck within nature, is to be able to look around and bring the mouth closer to food without moving the entire body.
While a useful adaptation, it is certainly not the only option.
The eyes could be moved independently of the head, while a proboscus or a trunk brings food to the body for example. This alone could lead to sapient beings which look drastically different from humans, even if they still have 2 arms and 2 legs.
Having more than 2 pairs of limbs may also lead to drastically different looking beings.
So i think having a very human like body plan doesn't nescicarely have to be the "most common type" of sapient life, simply because there are many variables that go into this.
i think it all depends on the conditions.
You have an earth sized planet with a large moon? You probably get life at least vaguely similar to Earth.
You got a moon of a gas giant with lower gravity?
Suddenly, very different kinds of "animals" may achive dominance.
@@keiranbroida2945 between us an an octopus, which leaves a lot of wiggle room. So brilliantly and amusingly put. That’s going to stick in my mind forever - thanks for that!
This is an argument me and the boys have about every time we get drunk😂
Thank you for making this! This was one of my main misconceptions about the potential of alien life before I watched this. I appreciate you taking the time to talk about seemingly “silly” topics like this
girl, i love your style, your editing, the way you explain stuff, ty for making these videos!❤
Thanks! Ignoring even life - carbon is extraordinary. I've often thought this is the fundamental "concept" of chemistry and is never explained in introductory chemistry. Why is carbon so special based on bond strength (indirectly based on the size of the atom etc I imagine) etc. Would be great to have a video on this basic concept. Then the fact that life is not based on silicon is more obvious. It isn't that life would be small - your equivalent of DNA or RNA would have to be smaller. But this is a great video too!
Looks like Anna Kendrik, talks like Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Wasn't expecting that.
One thing I wish you had touched on was silicon's property of being semi conductive. I think a lot of more modern sci-fi silicon aliens imagine them substituting some natural processes with an electronic alternative. I personally dont think this is likely to actually be practical but I think something similar to this is what a lot of silicon based sci fi people are imagining.
Like, maybe? But again, how likely are you going to find a planet that provides that specific kind of energy input for any silicon chemistry to take advantage of? You’d need the place to be practically soaked in EM radiation constantly, and that’s also not conducive to maintaining molecular bonds.
@@matthewtalbot6505the way I would imagine a silicon-based or any other non-organic organism existing would be as some sort of self replicating machine.
So, people hear Silicon and are like “oh yeah. Computer chips. And brains are kind of like computers!”
But that isn’t what biologists and chemists mean when they say “carbon based life
Like, Transformers are not “Silicon based life”, they are evolved robots.
Natural computers?
@@matthewtalbot6505
:photoelectric instead of photosynthetic.
I gotta say your explanation of this idea is very well done. You covered the nitty gritty details, the laymens explanation, and the historical context. Personally I have a hard time following things unless I have all three bases covered. You seemed to do it all in one video so kudos to that, thank you.
Great video! I love how you always debunk widespread misconceptions and crackpot theories with logic and scientific evidence.
I"m kinda loving Fred Hoyle actually. "It is better to be interesting and wrong than boring and right" is an incredible way to write a novel. Hell yes. This man saw people come up with the big bang theory and decided that he could invent a a better bang. He's got wild chaotic energy that I can't help but appreciate. He'd rather throw shit at the nobel prize committee than get an actual nobel prize.
Your horta silicon animal Star Trek musical interludes cracked me up every time. Also, I might have figured out what conditions might allow for the elusive silicon based life by watching your episode here. 😉 Maybe maybe enough to be plausible if nothing else. Thanks! Love the channel!
As a biophysicist and structural biologist, I have to say that you did an excellent job distilling this complex topic to a general audience. I couldn’t have done a better job, frankly.
Keep up the good work!
the clay hypothesis is so wild i love it. its giving hydrothermal vent hypothesis vibes
2 great hypotheses that taste great together.
Fred Hoyle, a contrarian fellow Yorkshireman, was my hero when I studied Physics at High School and university. He wrote some good Science Fiction too.
Your videos are the perfect balance of rigorous & hilarious
! I thought it was over and then you blew my mind in the last 2 minutes with that clay hypothesis. What a great essay, thank you for your service! I have always assumed carbon based life and was open to the idea life would find a way with whatever it had to work with, but you definitely gave me a reality check with silicon. Honestly tho, I like to daydream more about gas planet based life with a denser gas surrounding another to stop it from reacting to its environment.
ohhhhh that is a super neat thought to think, I'm going to think it now too :)
(when I was a kid, I had this super cool book of speculative biology [?] that tried to imagine what species might look like if they had evolved on the other planets in the solar system. There were some blimpy-bois on Jupiter, and I think the Venetians were made of silicon. I wish I could remember the name of it 😣)
@@idontwantahandlethough Jupiter is where I started picturing it happening and now that I think about it this book sounds really familiar, maybe I saw this too when I was a kid!
@Newtube_Channel I wanted to add in my original comment that I'm one of those weirdos that would argue silicon itself is "alive"
I've discovered you today by accident. One of the best YT discoveries ever (or at least since I've found Trey the explainer). I really like your style and you are doing a really great job talking about science. Thanks a lot!
22:53 am i missing something, or is that not SiO2, but SiO4?
You are indeed missing something. Do you see how there are lines going from the oxygen atoms off into "nothigness"? Those connect to other silicon atoms. The whole thing forms a giant network. Oviously you can't show the insane number of silicon and oxygen atoms in an average piece of glass, nor would that accomplish anything. So instead the drawing you see there represents the smallest unit this network is made out of. And instead of listing all of the atoms, we use an "empirical formula" which simply tells you the ratio of different elements. In the giant network, there are 2 oxygen atoms for every silicon atom, so SiO2. You can also get a single SiO2 molecule in the gas phase, in which case it looks like the CO2 molecule on the right.
@lunkel8108 i see. I saw the lines extending past and figured they were connecting to the next SiO4 or something. That's strange to me though, wouldn't that mean to maintain the ratio, there would be places where there's 2 Si next to 2 O? I thought all pure materials were a relatively consistent network of repeating structure
Yeah, I'm a lot more used to molecules being shown isolated, rather than connected to the other ones they form lattices or crystals with, so that threw me off
@@juancuelloespinosa Most molecules don't link together and form one giant molecule, but SiO2 does. You can see how this structure comes about (and how it fulfills the 2 to 1 ratio) if you imagine it forming from a bunch of single SiO2 molecules. In those, every oxygen is double bonded to a silicon, right? When they come together, they instead use one of the bonds in the double bonds (or more accuratel perhaphs, the electrons in that bond) to bond with a silicon atom in another molecule And the silicon of the first molecule is now missing a bond, so it accepts a bond from an oxygen atom. You end up with this structure where every silicon is surrounded by 4 oxygens and every oxygen is bonded to 2 different silicon atoms. I hope that was understandable through text, drawing it out helps.
Carbon is like that friend who is really good at social networking and just has every kind of friend and room for each of them in their life.
Silicon is more like the one who has lots of "friends,* but everyone knows they have an unhealthy obsession with a few particular people and will drop everything just to be around them.
im silicon for real
@@NolanWindholtzGGBILBOSWAGGIN Silicon is such a mood lmfao.
whats "unhealthy" about this? you cant spend equal amount of time with everyone you know. its the first time i hear someone say that its bad to have an actual deep bonds with people, what in the. like are you against the whole idea of having best friends, partners, close family? or would you prioritize someone you had a beer with literally once the same as your best friend you knew for 10+ years?
Virgin silicon vs Chad carbon
@@arnor398 Codependency and a healthy friendship are two different things. They *can* sound the same, though. Think the difference between JD and Turk's friendship from Scrubs vs. Hank Hill and Bill's relationship from King of the Hill.
Mad props for mentioning the "Black Cloud"! Most hard scifi gets obsolete and sounds silly two decades after being written. The "Black Cloud" is still surprisingly fresh for something written 65 years ago. Its story could happen today with minor change of wording. That novel is a marvel, a miraculous outlier among all the garbage that Fred Hoyle has written in his life.
Too bad she spoiled it…hope there’s more to it so it’s still worth reading
I loved the book, at 13, had no idea the author Fred Hoyle was a noted scientist! It's better than Huckleberry Finn, if you're looking for generative ideas.
I have no idea what black cloud is, but from the title it sounds like grey goo story? Bunch of nano bots consume everything? Idk... That's my guess.
This is one of the most thoroughly entertaining 30+ minute videos I have found in a long while. Lots of pausing and taking time to learn about things you casually reference, this channel is so up my alley. Thank you!
My favorite facts about organic life include that the electron transport chain uses these iron sulfide clusters to ferry electrons around. As a big fan of minerals, this is essentially just pyrite! Pyrite makes these beautiful cubic crystals and nearly identical cubic crystals exist within our own cells.
Also ATP synthase is a hydrogen powered windmill. It's the currency of energy in all life we know of and it's made in part by a literal, spinning windmill-like machine. We even have footage of it.
Is "ContraNarian" how you say "contrarian" or did I miss something?
I have never heard of the clay hypothesis being an actual physical process, so that's amazing. What really caught my attention about it is that I have been using a very similar image as an analogy for many years when I'm explaining to someone how DNA replicates without any intention. That since one strand can only make the mirror image of itself, and is the mirror image of the thing it's trying to create, it's like an impression left in clay that automatically gets filled in because only the right ingredients fit. Now I'm thinking that I must have heard the clay hypothesis sometime in school and thought it was a metaphor.
- "how DNA replicates without any intention"
Did you even ever actually looked on DNA replication mechanism?
- "it's like an impression left in clay that automatically gets filled in because only the right ingredients fit."
This is NOT how DNA replication works.
@@Llirik13 Did you ever even actually stop and think how aggressive this comment is when read? Chill. Please. We're all just trying to learn and work stuff out.
Dawkins has been talking about the origins of like for ages, that life originated from positive/negative replication of crystal structures. Dawking's idea has yet to be proven but it shares many similarities with the Clay Hypothesis (and I think it came first). Just pointing out that the ideas have been prominently floating around for at least the last 40-50 years.
Another great video! The transitions in this one were way smoother, and your enthusiasm for these topics bleed through. Probably my favorite small channel on this hellsite.
Thank you for this. You really did a great job outlining the reasons while simplifying it for the average person to follow along. Subscribed.
At 6:20 I was reminded once again how lucky we are that Hoyle set his life in a completely different direction by turning to astronomy after completing his Magnum Opus on playing cards.
Love the top 3 list because "winning" the argument in a bar will give me that warm feeling of self-importance. Jokes aside, really awesome video and love your content!
"Maybe if you HUMBLE yourself a little bit you'll find something!"
- The uneducated layman giving "advice" to an entire field of trained experts
Commented the uneducated layperson on a fellow layperson's video. I also get the feeling that you lot got a D in basic probability, something otherwise understood by middle school students.
By the first minute only I can tell this is going to be amazing